New KiBiSi is like a Danish industrial design Voltron (well, with only three parts, but still)

A newscast released today by CCTV discusses China’s industrial design boom. Unfortunately the newscast is poorly produced, poorly written (“industrial design” is written “industries design,” for instance) and laden with good ol’ Commie propaganda-speak (i.e. “highest levels of achievement,” etc.), although, if the figures are to be believed, there are some interesting takeaways:

Chen Dongliang, Director, Beijing Industrial Design Center, said, “The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.”

…The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output….”

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The past two years have seen a lot of upheaval in the auto industry, with some operatic rises and falls. Two of the world’s automakers that have been chugging along largely unnoticed amidst the drama (while quietly making profits and increasing in size) are Hyundai and Kia; and the good news for us is that in both companies, design is playing an increasingly significant role, particularly since they have each invested in design centers on three continents.

In an article looking at Kia, the BBC reports that

[Paul Philpott, Kia Motors Europe's COO] believes the key driver to future growth lies within the cars’ design, penned in Kia’s global design headquarters in Frankfurt, as well as in Seoul and in California.

“With the new products that we are now bringing to the market, the product design is coming together as one family,” he says.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal’s report on Hyundai points out that

Hyundai slowly beefed up its design capabilities over the past decade, adding staff in South Korea and building new design centers in Irvine, Calif., in 2002 and Russelsheim, Germany, in 2003…. Inside Hyundai, the designers battled a tradition that gave engineers and factory-process experts the final say in product design. In one recent instance where designers won out at Hyundai, the new Sonata has a thin line of chrome that stretches from the headlights along the hood and top of both doors to the back window. Keeping that lined up in production is a challenge for factory workers and, as a result, engineers resisted it, say company officials.

The article also points out that Hyundai, like BMW and the other big dogs, is seeking a unified design aesthetic across its fleet, the sort of “design DNA” we often hear about at lectures championing the importance of design in business.

Speaking of business, the already-giant Hyundai’s global sales grew 10% last year, while the rest of the industry’s declined by 2.5%; meanwhile up-and-comer Kia saw a staggering 1,200% (that’s not a typo) increase in net profits and a 270% increase in operating profits in 2009. So while there are currently tons of auto designers being downsized worldwide, hopefully they’ll soon have a place to go.

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MPs and senior construction industry experts Monday night attended a dinner hosted by the Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group and engineering consultancy Buro Happold. The purpose? To thrash out a tricky question: How to make good design a central concern to the construction industry.

The assembled worthies, seated around a very long table at the Institute for Civil Engineers in London and overlooked by portraits of engineering ancestors, were addressed by the Shadow Minister for Construction Mark Prisk(pictured above) and the Government’s Chief Construction Advisor, before attacking the debate themselves over dessert and coffee.

The background: With some worthy and notable exceptions, the UK construction industry is accused of being resistant to change, motivated by cost, and adversarial in attitude. This is not only inconvenient, it is a major problem for a country with the massive challenge of meeting (legally binding) sustainability targets, in the midst of a recession, in the face of growing global competition. We are a small island, sinking in the wake of larger powers.

The APDIG assembled this group of concerned individuals with a view and leverage on the issue to try and identify a solution. Or, perhaps more realistically, a path towards a solution.

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Here’s a good example of design’s capability to shake up the supply chain for positive gain: Cambridge Consultants’ new Syreen, a green syringe concept “designed to ease the resource intensity and material wastage associated with traditional syringe development and manufacture.”

Instead of glass, Syreen syringes are made with COP (cyclic olefin polymer) plastic, which has enabled Cambridge Consultants to shed the need for secondary packaging altogether, a first in this medical device arena. The makeup of the Syreen allows syringes to clip together, nesting in a pack while the COP design doubles as the outer shell of the packaging itself. The Syreen therefore eliminates the need for wasteful fillers such as cardboard and styrofoam, reducing the packaging weight by 30 percent and volume by 50 percent from today’s standard packaging. The United States alone produces 6,600 tons of medical waste per day, equalling well over two million tons per year–approximately 85 percent of which goes to landfills throughout the country.1

“What makes Syreen so exciting is that while it is a sustainable alternative to the status quo, it can truly introduce a paradigm shift in the existing supply chain,” said Phil Lever, Commercial Director, Drug Delivery Devices for Cambridge Consultants. “We found that typical glass syringes use many materials from all over the world and that shipping costs are egregious due to inefficiencies in packaging. This marriage of economy and ecology shows that medical device companies will likely see competitive benefits by taking sustainability seriously.”

Cambridge Consultants is currently seeking a member of Big Pharma to team up with and get this thing into production.

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PriestmanGoode, a London design house that has worked on everything from cell phones to speakers to first-class cabins for Swiss Airlines, has developed — at the request of UK’s Design Council — a radical solution to how hospital wards should be designed. Fast Company reports:

“PG has just released their proposal today, in a “healthcare manifesto.” The central problems facing hospital design happen to have already been solved in the design of first-class cabins for airlines, they say. “

Strange though that the article and the manifesto don’t say a word about the quality of medical care.

>> Read article

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Levi Strauss & Co. and Forum for the Future call for the fashion industry to work together to create a sustainable world in a new report launched today that explores the future of the trillion dollar sector.

Fashion Futures presents four vivid scenarios of the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry, helping companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable business.

Slow is Beautiful

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Cool Hunting unveiled their redesign over the weekend, and we’re majorly digging the “infinite scroll.” It takes about a second to get used to–think of it as the inverse of Tweetie’s “release to refresh”–and you can just scroll ’til it’s time to, well, time to get back to work. They’re also rocking the old-school Courier, and some other very nice touches throughout. You can view latest entries in grid, shortened, or full form, and we like the sweet verb-ing of the nav buttons on rollover.

Read about the redesign here, or just hit the homepage and immerse yourself cold.

Congrats to Josh, Evan, and the whole Cool Hunting crew!!

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His answers are short and straightforward, so we’ll follow suit and avoid giving you a bad-pun headline like “Alessi is amore.” Here’s 20 questions with Alberto Alessi from the Financial Times, including a big one: “How do you want to be remembered?” (Hint: It’s not for ID!)

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I felt a little tawdry purchasing the two unauthorized Steve Jobs biographies that I did, largely because they were hailed as being sensationalist, inaccurate, and produced in defiance of their subject’s wishes; but I consider Jobs one of the most important non-designer Americans to have an influence on product design in this era, and I was curious to learn about him.

Well, looks like there will be an official biography after all, as Jobs has agreed to cooperate with former Time E-in-C Walter Isaacson on a printed version of the story of his life (or at least the story of his business).

Jobs’ book will be in good company on library shelves–Isaacson previously penned biographies on Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

By the by, doesn’t Jobs kinda look like Ashton Kutcher’s brother in that photo above?

And as for why Jobs waited this long to do a biography, I’m thinking maybe he wanted to wait until there was a compelling device to read it on.

via daily tech

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