You've got one month left to enter this year's Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge, witha monster prize of $100,000 each year for "comprehensive solutions that radically advance human well-being and ecosystem health."

According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the winning solution will be a system—not a stand-alone innovation, but a project that strategically integrates social, economic, environment, political and cultural issues—that exemplifies the trimtab principle. Often used by Bucky himself, the metaphor refers to small steering devices used on ships and airplanes where relatively small amounts of leverage are applied at the right time to maximum effect.

For a full rundown of the competition, the criteria, and the jury, visit The Buckminster Fuller Institute's website, or watch Elizabeth Thompson, the executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, give a run down on Design Science above.

Deadline: Monday October 4th

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We love the new collection released bye eco-friendly undies line PACT in partnership with the Creative Growth, a contemporary art center in Oakland that "focuses on unlocking the creativity of adults artists with developmental disabilities."

The collection comprises of six prints, each a talented Creative Growth artist: Erin Punzel, William Tyler, Donald Mitchell, Dan Miller, and Maureen Clay. 10% the sale of each pair of sustainably-produced underwear goes towards the Creative Growth, to support their continued nurturing of creativity.

See the full collection at PACT, which is available for purchase beginning today. Our favorite? Stripes, pictured above.

Also, if you're in San Francisco, keep your eyes peeled for a PACT party at Creative Growth, where you can see the originating artworks in person.

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This year at the London Design Festival, the Shop at Jasper Morrison's studio, full of super normal household objects, will display a selection of trays from around the world— a selected few are pictured above. Morrison will also launch three new products of his own, The Country Trainer, designed for Camper; a telephone for Punkt, and a platinum grey ceramic R5.5 chronograph for Rado.

Trays from Around the World at the Jasper Morrison Shop
24b Kingsland Road, London
11.00am - 6.00pm , September 18-26, 2010
Open until 8.00pm on Tuesday the 21st for an opening coinciding with the Shoreditch Design Triangle event.

Shop photograph by Nicola Tree.

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TokyoFlash, that manufacturer of eye-catching, bizarrely-complicated timepieces, is seeking new watch design concepts through their Design Challenge. The language is murky as to whether or not winning submissions will see actual production, but the entries are coming in hard and fast all the same.

Think you can out-weird these guys? Enter the competition here, or peruse the incoming entries here.

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These days there are high-end hotels in Las Vegas that will sell you new versions of the luxurious sheets, pillows, and even toiletries that they stock their rooms with. But the casinos on their ground floors are a different story; no one wants to furnish their house with the gaudy trappings surrounding a roulette table.

Las Vegas Carpets was an exhibit by photographer Chris Maluszynski, no longer on display but captured in a Wired gallery here. Looking through them you wonder, why are all these patterns so awful? The article provides a possible answer:

Dave Schwartz, Director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas...theorizes that "casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble."

via wired

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This is pretty nuts-and-bolts ID, but I believe we're looking here at an early, primitive version of a design that we'll see more refined versions of in the future. The Pallet Sign, by U.K.-based Fripp Design & Research, is a simple series of clips that cover the sides of shipping pallets and provide a surface for signage, angled upwards so standing consumers can read them. Why?

Steve Roberts, director at Fripp Design and Research explains: 'Many retailers use pallets to display fast moving goods to save time and avoid the risk of damaging them. We recognised that the problem with pallets is that they can look unsightly in-store and product packaging is not always designed to sell the benefits of the individual products for sale. Pallet Sign hides pallets from view, as well as providing retailers and manufacturers with a vital POS sales tool to help them promote products to customers.'

via engineering capacity

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After an eight month international search, Core-fave Rama Chorpash was selected to join Parsons The New School for Design School of Constructed Environments (SCE). He'll be taking a tenure track position as Associate Professor of Product Design, and as the Director of Product Design. As Director, he will be charged to help create an integrated academic vision for SCE, including the MFA in Product Design and other new programs. And though he'll surely have his hands full, Rama will still be running his Rama Chorpash Design consultancy.

You'll recall Rama's star turn in our Design, Wit, and the Creative Act event (we miss you Tobi!), and you can read more about Rama in this Nice NYTimes article on Rama from 2006 here.

Congrats Rama!

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Hammer 1.0 was a rock. Hammer 2.0 was a rock attached to a piece of wood, and the caveman that came up with that one must have been pretty pleased; he was the first ergonomicist.

Today we have tons of tools featuring a handle of one material and a head made of another, but there's an ecological problem with this design: The two things can wear out at different rates. In my lifetime I've thrown away scores of toothbrushes because the bristles were spent, but I've never thrown one away because the handle wore out.

Full Circle is a company that "closely monitor[s] the environmental and social impact of our products," and their Laid Back Dish Brush features a removeable brush head so you needn't toss the whole thing out, but can keep buying replaceable heads as you need them. Here's to hoping they start doing toothbrushes.

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Guest post by Russell Maschmeyer.

On the final afternoon of Adaptive Path's UX Week, Iain Roberts (Partner and Co-Leader of IDEO Chicago) presented his team's remarkable work on My Ford Touch, Ford's new driver interface platform. I sat down with Iain and Gary Braddock (Ford's Chief Interior Designer) earlier that morning to discuss their research, prototyping, and production process and got a sneak peak at Gary's Lincoln prototype.

My Ford Touch is rolling out into vehicles next year, beginning with the 2011 Lincoln MKX and subsequently the entire Lincoln line, followed shortly by the Ford and Mercury lines. It's the most comprehensive update to driver interfaces the market has seen since the automatic transmission. The partnership between IDEO and Ford was aimed a producing a stronger connected platform for Ford drivers--to re-think the driver interface experience from the ground up. The results are pretty compelling.

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"Cheap, high quality, long lasting." These are the words that Enzo Mari bluntly lists as main goals for his Autoprogettazione project. That, in addition to, "If someone tried to build something, they would learn something" are the simple maxims that summarize the seemingly simple results of this far-sighted project, originally conceived in 1974 and now being revived through production of Mari's Sedia 1 chair by Artek.

In celebration of their 75th anniversary, Artek has partnered with Mari to 'produce' the Sedia 1 chair, meaning they are selling a kit that includes a stack of wood (pre-cut pine boards), nails, and blueprints for the chair. Along with the project, Artek released a lovely little documentary, "Enzo Mari for Artek: Homage to Autoprogettazione," which debuted at the Triennale in Milan in April, and was shown at an event at the Conran Shop in NYC last Wednesday. The film allows Mari himself to tell the story of the project. Alternately smoking a cigar and getting down to business building a Sedia 1 himself, the 78-y.o. working designer recounts why he started the project, and why he is thrilled (in that low-key straight-faced Mari way) that Artek chose to produce the Sedia 1 now.

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