Portable Spot Cleaner, designed by Adrian Mankovecky, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia

If the Electrolux Design Lab competition were given charge of the future of our home appliances, all our gadgets would be monochrome, have oversize back-lit interfaces, and be either rounded or flexible. Since its inception in 2003, the competition has been asking industrial design students to imagine the future of home appliances, offering 5,000 Euros and a six-month stint at an Electrolux design center to the winner.  Each year’s theme is different, but the finalists always have a remarkable family resemblance. And they always manage to work past the fact that domestic appliances are energy guzzlers by suggesting some as-yet-unproven battery technology – sugar crystal batteries are a hot favorite this year, perhaps because they were specified in last year’s winning entry.

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A criticism frequently heard at recent furniture expos, from Milan to New York, was the absence of real product innovation. The bad economy has something to do with this shortage: During the past few years many manufacturers have used restraint, showing few new products, trotting out previous years’ introductions.

Still, there were a few surprises. One of them was the first-ever presence of Minnesota-based 3M, sandwiched in between bathroom faucets and textile stands at ICFF in a shiny, large-scale booth that seemed to say little more than, “We’re here!”. A Midwestern approach to attention-grabbing?  At closer inspection I found one of the most interesting offerings, no larger than an iPad: a new way to light up a building using sunlight – sans skylights or photovoltaic transfer.

“Sunlight Delivery System,” 3M’s daylighting solution, uses one of the company’s noteworthy inventions, a highly reflective film, familiar to users of LCD screens and smart phones. This luminous film brings sunlight inside a building through galvanized steel ducts connected to a rooftop catchall. Read more…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average American is finding his or her relationship to health and wellness a bit… well… on the rocks. In a time of decreased fitness, increased processed foods, and a general lack of self awareness, most of us can’t figure out how to repair this broken relationship, though we really want to. A classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Who’d have thought that the semester of health classes in high school wouldn’t give us the answers we’d need 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years later?

Enter Kaiser Permanente’s interactive Center for Total Health—the therapist you’ve been looking for, that is, if you’re in the Washington D.C. area. The new center was created to begin the discussion on national health as well as act as a meet-and-greet between patients and new medical innovations.

That tablet your doctor is carrying instead of her standard clipboard? It’s probably the new Blackberry Playbook which is being used to look up your medical chart or scan the barcode of the prescription you’ll be picking up in an hour. Having trouble remembering when to take how much of that particular medicine? The Philips Medication Dispensing Service will dispense, in your home, the correct medication at the right dosage at the right time. Or even if you’re in perfect health, you may be intrigued by GE Health’s Vscan ultrasound, which looks like a sleek device from the iPod family, but is capable of allowing sonographers to take their services to rural areas where such technologies aren’t yet available. In the realistic future, we may not be androids, but we sure are using them to our advantage. Read more…

The curtain-wall is perhaps the defining innovation of twentieth century architecture. Since the heyday of high modernism, a search for new building forms has usually meant grappling with a glass and steel grid. But as the demands on architecture have changed, in terms of energy performance and sustainable materials, we’ve had to completely rethink the role of a building’s skin.  Earlier this year, the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued an open call for innovative designs of curtain-wall systems. Six of the entries they received were selected to form the “Innovate” section of the exhibition Innovate: Integrate at New York’s Center for Architecture (CFA.) Read more…

There is a new naval battle being fought off the coast of Britain, but not of the kind that Admiral Nelson would recognize. The ocean is turning out to be the next frontier for renewable energy, and Britain leads the world in off-shore wind energy generation – it has already installed 330 wind turbines on its seas. Now several engineering firms are vying with each other to develop giant wind turbines for Britain, with capacities in excess of 10MW – double the size and power of any existing turbines.

Two Norwegian firms are currently in the lead, both offering mammoth windmills that “float” in areas where the sea is too deep to lay foundations. Read more…

As of last month, travelers catching an American Airlines flight out of New York’s JFK airport have a new option for killing time before their boarding call: an 8-by-12-foot digital display, conveniently located between security and the departure gates, that lights up and announces “Welcome to the Smarter City!” every time someone walks within six feet of its huge, colorful screen.

Passersby who are suitably enticed to check out the gizmo will find an interactive touch-screen display showcasing IBM’s recent foray into large-scale, digital-technology-driven solutions for smarter, more livable cities. Specifically, users will be able to explore six neighborhoods of a hypothetical city, and learn about the various smart systems that IBM has imagined for them—things like coordinating police and fire department responses to emergencies by shared data systems, or centralizing health-care information to allow citizens easy access to their medical records. Bright and cheery touch icons lead the way to fancy animations, impressive graphs, and videos of mayors telling you how IBM solutions have transformed their cities.

Nifty stuff—but since when has IBM cared about smart cities? Read more…

Yet more news from Yves Béhar: the prolific designer has teamed up with GE to develop the WattStation, a plug-in electric vehicle charger with a cute, colorful form. It’s powerful too: according to GE, the WattStation’s “level 2 capability” will decrease typical charging time from 12–18 hours to as little as 4–8 hours. Check out a video of Behar describing his “small, soft, and friendly dispenser of electricity” after the jump. Read more…

A computer-generated rotation of the atrium at 41 Cooper Square

The moment people start talking about “paradigm shifts” in any profession, you can be sure there’s some big, disturbing change on its way. One thing was clear at last night’s “Shifting Paradigms: Design in Transition” event at the Center for Architecture, in New York: the digital age is about to hit architecture on the head with a knuckle duster. The proliferation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software has already changed the way architects communicate with builders and clients; now it may force design professionals to find new ways to validate their very existence. Read more…

The race for the ultimate classroom computer has been on for a while. One Laptop Per Child was the celebrity frontrunner, of course, but its creators ran into some trouble and had to scrap their dual-screen OLPC XO-2 design. Meanwhile, Intel has had its eye on classrooms in emerging markets since 2007 with its low-cost Classmate PC series. And now a new kid has joined the class, at this month’s Wall Street Journal D8 conference in California. Everybody, say hi to Kno.

Kno (left) is a dual-screen e-reader textbook replacement that also allows students to take notes, access multimedia content, and generally interact with their study material in ways that are impossible with the outmoded paper textbook. The device has two 14-inch screens, each about half an inch thick, that are large enough to allow students to view full textbook pages without scrolling. At 5.5 pounds, it is much heavier than two iPads, but it will also be cheaper (less than $1,000). I’m particularly charmed by one little design detail: the borders around the screens are asymmetrical, so the Kno actually has inner margins and outer margins, just like a textbook. Plus, it carefully avoids the kiddie colors and oversize rounded edges that have become the hallmark of classroom computers. Read more…

Forever cementing its image as the champion of mobile telephony in emerging markets, Nokia launched a new product last week: a bicycle-powered cell phone charger. The idea isn’t new in the developing world—a couple of Kenyan students came up with a similar product last year—but Nokia’s will be the first commercially produced version. The device will initially be sold in Africa, for about $18, and will go on sale worldwide by the end of the year. Nokia wins all around: it adds to its eco-credentials with a great new sustainable product; and allowing people with limited access to electricity to charge a cell phone will not, I’m sure, harm Nokia’s already amazing sales figures in Africa, China, and India. Read more…