1HDC - Topic Suggestions

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!

That one sounds like a lot of fun!

Someone said it here recently that the most interesting design happens with things that are completely simple in funcio, like watches and Chairs. Seems like a good exercise in that kind of thinking

Also, it’s Olympic Torch re-design time…

“Maybe we should really narrow the project by having a product category (ie printers) and a theme (ie printers for zero g). It would be like a vacation to design something for a fantasy world. Plus, it would encourage more creativity than the more results oriented save-the-world design challenges.”

That would be a better idea, creating a design for fantasy world will be great.

Something that isn’t likely to be designed by many. like jimmy jane’s or taphandle’s Simple, not so techy, woody, old western type.

I like the idea of designing something for fantasy - give the option to design something that is purely aesthetic rather than functional. The space idea is great, but what about something themed nearer the Halloween season - survival equipment for the zombie apocalypse?

Zombie apocalypse survival gear would be awesome!

How about one for Feb? Could be… um… snowblowers?

Okay, I’m bored and want to flex some design muscle. Since it’s summer, and there’s a drought around here… how about fire extinguishers? Those are boring looking, should be easy to make some fun stuff.

Or fire-fighting in general ? Lets get this going, i need something to do

I’m 61. My blood pressure was high but is now controlled by two tablets I take every day. I was blessed to be born into a family with propensity toward high cholesterol, so I take two caplets for that every morning. I am hypothyroid, which is controlled by a little bitty tablet that I will have to take every morning for the rest of my life. So, what’s that five tablets so far? Oh yeah, as men get older the tendency is to have lower than normal levels of Vitamin D, so I take an over the counter supplement. And just to be on the safe side (my doctor tells me) I take a baby aspirin every morning to thin my blood and lessen the likelihood of a heart attack… … so, that’s seven things I take every morning, and they all come in a plastic bottle. I go through roughly 80 bottles a year and had been saving them for some reason, perhaps thinking that I would come across some clever use for them. But finally, having a box full of them, I decided to throw them in the “recycle bin”.


I had lunch with my buddy Johann yesterday; he’s my pharmacist and I see him every other week or so when I pick up my prescriptions. I asked Johann how many prescription bottles, of various sizes, he went through a month. He had never really considered it before and it took a few minutes of pondering; his estimate came out to a remarkable number … 4,100 bottles per month. 49,200 prescription bottles per year.

The Rite-Aid pharmacy that Johann manages is only one of 52 local pharmacies within a fifteen mile radius. Do the math, if these other pharmacies have similar usage numbers that is 2,558,400 bottles per years. San Luis Obispo county is a rural area with a population of 270,000. That’s roughly 9.5 bottles per year for everyone in the county. A little overly simplified math reveals 300,000,000 (US population) x 9.5 bottles per person, per year = 2,850,000,000 little brown plastic prescription bottles… just in the US.

There must be a better way to dispense drugs. They can not, by law, be dispensed in used containers (say you wanted to have your prescriptions refilled into the bottles you had) because they are not sterile, they must be “child proof”, and of course they must have a label on them. Sizes vary dependent upon the size of the medication.

So there’s your challenge. Design a new pharmaceutical dispensing system.

That’s definitely a design problem, but I think it’s worthy of a bit more than 1 hour of sketching, no? Seems more like a design contest without such limited constraints.

usually constraints make good design solution more interesting…