1HDC - Topic Suggestions

Why the hell not? leaving aside the patent thing for a second (and let’s face it, if someone’s going to steal your idea, they’re going to steal it, change it by 10% and re-patent it anyway no matter what measures you have in place), a lot of the things that people come up with for the 1HDC could well be made and help people, particularly the emergency shelters one that’s been done recently. We should all aspire to create something amazing and potentially life-changing instead of drawing cars or yet another pair of bloody sneakers.

So, how about some hardcore topics that focus on functionality over form and are going to make people really think. Like:

Sustainability
Solar-power (or the uses thereof)
Sustainable power generation
Water purification
Alternative uses for landfill items
Using technology to be sustainable
Crash helmets (cycling, motorbike riding etc)
Wheelchairs
Small form factor first aid kits

And to keep the sneaker and car drawing lot happy, how about interspersing the hard stuff with the fun stuff where it really is form over function:

Rock climbing holds
Hats with uses (sensible or otherwise)

Those where it’s about both:

Sledges/toboggans
Snowboard boots/bindings/boards (or skis)
Travel coffee mugs that don’t leak or break when you drop them!
Motorbikes
New environmentally friendly methods of transport
Future appliances
Awesome and totally unnecessary guns :wink:
Boats - yacht and/or speedboats

And you can go totally off the wall with weirdness too:

Steampunk technology (look it up on wikipedia if you don’t know what it is)
Unicycles (Soooooooooooo hard, how do you reinvent something that’s a seat, a pair of peddles and one wheel???)
Things that look like one thing but actually do something else entirely

I think that’s about it. I’m interested in people’s comments, I’ve been lurking here for ages and don’t sketch but do design and build. Furniture, buildings and interiors mostly (I’m good with my hands and on Sketchup) but I’m itching to enter some of the 1HDCs and just need to figure out how to sketch all the ideas I have.

What a first post.

So how does “totally unnecessary guns” and “speedboats” differ at all from cars and sneakers? Good luck on that sustainable power generation solution… within an hour. We’ve tried a number of different projects if you dig into the archives, and the ones that tend to get the biggest response are the fun ones (like speedboats). Anything that verges on an MIT pot graduate student’s thesis type of thing is general seen as more work. Most of us have lots of that, so try our best to keep them fun and accomplishable with an hour.

I’'m going to take that as a compliment :wink:

I don’t think I’ve seen speedboats on here much, if at all and I definitely haven’t seen totally unnecessary guns! But, I have seen a huge number of cars/sneakers/phones/watches so that’s how they differ, it’s just something different for you all to draw. As someone who loves design and totally appreciates how hard it is to come up with anything approaching a good idea that hasn’t been done before, I’d have thought that drawing things that you don’t sketch day in day out would be better for getting the creative juices flowing. Although, I appreciate the point about it just being more work. As someone who comes on here largely to get inspiration and see cool stuff, I personally don’t give a rats ass about cars or sneakers. Or unnecessary guns to be honest, although they are cool.

If you guys really want to push my buttons, design me a wicked bathtub that’s big enough for two people to happily soak in (doesn’t matter if they’re one at each end) and fits in a gap of 2200mm long by 700mm wide or less. Oh, and it needs to be able to be made otherwise it’s useless :wink:

Charity starts at home, and the first sketch starts with you. There are a lot of different thing;s in the doodling topic. Would love to see a contribution!

usmcoap, you have some good ideas in there. To what Yo said, getting big sweeping ideas covered in an hour is not the purpose of the 1HDC. The 1HDC started as nothing more than a way to try and get peoples juices flowing. A warm up, or distraction, from “the rest of the day”.

What I believe I hear you saying, and something I aree with, is that more variety is needed. Less “typical designer stuff” and more to the basics of coming up with some good ideas. Something which I believe the 1hdc has gotten away from.

As to your tub design:




I always thought that the best marketing campaign would be the shot an elderly couple in the stand-up tub doing more than just taking a bath…you always hear that “retirement community” is just another term for “Band Camp”.

Bang on. There can be fun and creative juice flowingness without a million and seven people drawing cars. And giving people weird ass things to draw as the topic (even if they fall into the too hard basket for some) will do more to get people’s juices flowing than giving them something easy. It will also get up the noses of the people that can only draw cars and hopefully will give them some inspiration to enter the next one, or the next one after that… And hey presto, Core77 becomes even better than it already is.

That’s just nasty. I personally was thinking more along the lines of:

Do you? I hope there are no flutes involved. My grandmother is 90 and lives in a retirement community and she can barely get around at all, almost never leaves the house now. Whenever I go and visit, the whole place looks like it’s filled with people preparing to die… Although your option is only slightly more disturbing than that :wink:

And Yo, I don’t sketch, like I said, but I do design and I do make. If you want to see some of the stuff I build, check out my very amateur (for amateur see “free”) site here http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~usmcoap/ All my own work and some hard yards put in there, particularly the desk.

you know what might be fun? Design the iPad 4.0 or some other tablet “in between a phone and computer” device for a few years down the line- After seeing the results from microsoft with the courrier, Hp with the slate, and Fusion Garage with the JooJoo, let’s see what a community of designers can come up with… maybe flex those graphic design muscles a bit? It’d be pretty good timing with all these new tablet computers coming out and all…

Done. What is it you desire this device to do? It can do it. How big do you want it? Done. How small? Done.

“sarcastic emoticon”

got another idea for a 1HDC. Sorta based on the Design Thinking and Rethinking an Industry topics. What about a 1HDC where it’s not sketches that are the deliverables, but an idea. It would work basically this way-

Propose an industry or more complex problem (ie. How could shipping be more efficient, what to be done with the IDSA, what could future media/TV/book industries look like, how could a production process be streamlined, etc. ???

The results would be comments, thoughts and general design thinking. Design, in many ways, in its best forms are about ideas, concepts and “what-ifs” not only nice sketches and forms. Why don’t we play around in this area more? I think it could be not only a beneficial exercise, fun, and get some interesting results, but would also counter the idea that ID is only about making nice looking things. In my own experience, I’d say about half the results I’m proud of in my own portfolio are a result of thinking like this (ie. new business ideas, planning, strategy, etc.) and not just some nice product.

Thoughts?

R

Couldn’t all of these ideas be expressed visually? Sketches and ideas kinda go hand in hand in my opinion. I personally won’t read 1HDC posts that do not have pictures if I’m casually browsing. Hence the importance of infographics, sketches, visuals, etc.

Here’s some more suggestions:

Design 4 Survival:
As Dieter Rams pointed out. We’d better make our products autonomous since their might be a day where the whole system collapses. Whether this might happen or not doesn’t matter. Must be an interesting exercise.

Dependent User Products
Make a product user-dependent. So the user must ‘care’ for it. Therefore the user will develop a relationship with the product and not cast it away easily/quickly. After Robots by Dune&Raby. A sort of Tamagothi-effect. You don’t change your pet because a new fancier one walks by do you?

The Fun Theory:
Just check the link:
http://www.thefuntheory.com/

Design for Dissabled people

Educational Toy?

When’s the next 1HDC?

design around rising sea levels, portable/floating homes made from shipping containers?

Here’s a fun idea-

For a 1HDC, pick a simple CE product (ie.toaster, flashlight, electric tootbrush, thermos, whatever) , and pick one or multiple eras (ie. 50’s, 60’s 80’s etc.). The challenge is to design the product in your choice of eras by giving it era appropriate style cues, without it being overly retro or cliched.

Could be great fun, something different, and would be fun to see how different people interpret different eras and what cues they pull to express them.

R

PS. This was all brought to mind the other day when I saw some guy riding a late 50’s/early 60’s bicycle that had a chrome headlight fairing that looked like the grill of a Caddy all along the top tube, and ended with fins of sorts under the downtube. I immediately thought how cool and era specific it was and at the same time how cool a modern retro inspired version could be. Sorry no pics.

I agree, RK…this one is fun!

Another idea I thought of last night- (kinda a take on a first year project I did):

Have a selected product category for each 1HDC (or a few per 1HDC). Things like medical devices, military devices, kids toys, automotive things, etc.

The challenge is to design and object in the style of the category, but the trick is the object isn’t actually a thing. The challenge is picking up the visual cues for the category (ie. massing, materials, details, graphics, forms, etc.) that communicate or relate to the category.

For example, in medical, you could design some sort of box, that has flush touch buttons, some sort of screen, some vents, coloring in white and a light blue/green… It doesn’t have to DO/BE ANYTHING.

It’s a good challenge because it gets you thinking about other product categories and what makes things visually fit into those categories without thinking about function, utility, ergonomics, etc. Perfect for a 1HDC that is fun, puts everyone on an even playing field (you don’t have to have any experience with the category), and can teach you quite a bit about visual DNA.

R

That’s a really awesome idea! I’m going to do a few of those exercises on my own anyway. Cool.

Checking out iabs post in the projects section about his bird house got me thinking about maybe an offshoot of the 1HDC.

It might be cool to do a challenge that involved using scrap material from each individuals workplace (under the assumption that most people here have access to some kind of shop or proto dept.) Maybe have a project and give everybody a month to tackle it using the materials they use everyday. Obviously the end result doesn’t have to be a months worth of work but hopefully this would give people enough time to bang something out, a little research, a few sketches, a finished proto (maybe just a rendering if you don’t have access to have it made).

Using scrap material doesn’t have to be a set in stone rule, maybe just a bonus.
Just a thought.

I’ve just posted these in the associated topics, but how about-

  1. new Xbox

  2. Redesign of the IDEO school chair

  3. Any other recent, relevant new design. Would perhaps be a great idea to have the 1HDC continuously be about whatever new product is released and how we think it could be better. Would also be timely news so likely to get picked up by tech or whatever blogs when the new product is in the news cycle. Would also easily generate a lot of entries as generally speaking people have more of a reaction to something new thinking “hey, I could do that better” or “what if it was like…”, instead of just random topics.

Could perhaps even rename if 1HDC: “What I would have done if handed the pen”

Sorta like a design Monday Night Quarterbacking session.

R

Having just spent the last 6 weeks on a round the world trip and done over 36,500 miles flying, I would love to see someone redesign plane seats to come up with something that’s just better than what’s already there. Because let’s face it, [plane seats suck. Not business or first class seats but coach, or as I like to call it, “cattle class”. You all know the ones I mean; the ones where you can’t actually straighten your legs, where the seatback screen is at nose level if the person in front reclines their seat and where there’s no room to do anything. One of you talented lot must be able to come up with an elegant solution that means that they can still pack em in like they want but the people sitting in them can actually be comfortable!