A design competition for Haitian assistance

“It is just as desirable to build a chicken house as it is to build a cathedral.” —Frank Lloyd Wright

So opens the Poultry Project’s 2010 Chicken Coop Design Competition, a call to farmers, designers, architects, artists, and locavores to design a chicken coop for use in urban and suburban backyards. The ideal coop should integrate “aesthetics with utility,” helping chickens thrive so they can lay some eggs.

The winners will receive two cash prizes of $500 and $250, and the winning designs will be modified for use in Uganda, where the Poultry Project and TASO, a Ugandan organization) help AIDS orphans start small poultry businesses where they can earn money selling eggs.

The requirements of the coop are well detailed on the Poultry Project’s competition site, including nesting zones, perches, and a light source. For more detailed guidelines and an entry form, click here.

You shouldn’t need to look much farther for inspiration than the venerable Silkie Bantam chicken, pictured below (he’s like a Muppet, my dream hen).

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The International Interior Design Association has teamed up with Metropolis Magazine to bring us the Smart Environments Awards, with the tagline, “Good design is more than pretty. It’s Smart.”

If you’ve designed a smart environment that was completed after April 2009 and has not yet been published, you’re eligible to submit it. Winning projects will be presented at the USGBC Greenbuild Expo and considered for publication in Metropolis Magazine.

Details here.

Deadline: September 23, 2010

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A few months ago, Umbra sponsored a competition to celebrate it’s 30th anniversary, entitled You Design. All were invited to submit photos on how they’ve use Umbra gear creatively in their space. Three finalists have just been announced; they’ll receive airfare and accomodations to attend the Umbra 30th anniversary party, where the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners will be announced.

The finalists are the Bear Can, Cupcake Tier and Mon Faux Foyer, pictured above. Find out more about them here.

Browsing all the submissions is also pretty fun, though voting has long ended, you can take a peek <a href="http://www.youdesignumbra.com/
“>here.

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Braunprize 2009.

One of our favorite (and one of the oldest) design awards, the Braunprize has announced plans to expand and revamp before it’s next triennial appearance in 2012. In addition to putting the prize back on its former rotation of once every three years, the changes will increase its accessibility and engage design consumers and kindle a renewed interest in emerging markets.

The revamp is is being led by Professor Oliver Grabes, Head of Braun Corporate Design, and Phil Dunan, P&G’s Global Design Officer. Grabes says:

In making some significant changes to the awards process, we are further establishing our commitment to the accessibility of this competition and want to ensure that it not only provides a showcase to those who want to pursue a career in design, but that it also encourages engagement with design for those enthusiasts and professionals outside of an academic context.” He continues “As ever, we want to support great ideas, clarity of vision and practical, beautiful and intuitive solutions to everyday concerns, the trademarks of Braun’s influential design process.

The details are still under wraps and the competition still long in coming, but it’s never too early to start planning! For inspiration see the 2009 winners and awards ceremony,

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The Earth Awards is a global search for “design innovations that will change the way we live and pave the way to imminent sustainable revolution.” They are seeking entries in six broad categories: Built Environment, Fashion, Products, Systems, Future and Social Justice. Entries may be realized or in prototype stage and will be judged on six criteria: “Achievable, Scalable, Measurable, Useful, Original and Ecological.” One grand prizewinner will receive $50,000, and each category winner will receive $10,000.

They’ve rounded up quite a team of judges for this, from curators to designers to scientists. The list includes Paola Antonelli, MoMA; David DeRothschiled, Adventure Ecology; His Holiness Gyalwang Drukpa; Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC; Dr. Jane Goodall, The Jane Goodall Institute; Peter Head, ARUP; Graham Hill, Treehugger; Ira Magaziner, The Clinton Foundation; Phillipe Starck, Designer; and many, many more. See them all here.

Submissions are being accepted now through May 10th, 2010. Check out last year’s grand prize winner: FAB.REcology by Neri Oxman, then find all the information you need to enter here.

Thanks, Alissa!

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We’re excited to announce that the long-awaited Betacup Challenge is now accepting entries! The competition has a clear goal: to dramatically reduce (or eliminate) the wastage resulting from unrecyclable paper coffee cups—about 58 billion every year. And, with $20,000 worth of prize money, provided by Starbucks (who intends to serve all their beverages in reusable/recyclable cups by 2015), the Betacup challenge raises the stakes with real incentive and reward.

Toby Daniels, Shaun Abrahamson and Marcel Botha devised the contest not only to address the disposable coffee cup, but also to bring great design minds together to focus sharply on the problem. The challenge is being run through the open innovation platform Jovoto, fostering open critique and dialogue in hopes of developing truly breakthrough concepts.

To help get you started, the Betacup team has done a ton of preparatory legwork. Their resources page includes preliminary research, collected precedents and even their own bodystorming session (they’re right there with you, down in the trenches). Visit the betacup site to review all this, then head over and register. Remember, even if you’re not planning to submit anything, you are still invited to join the community and rate ideas.

Core77 is proud to be a media sponsor; we’ll be featuring some of our favorite submissions on the blog every couple of weeks, until submissions close on June 1st, Stay tuned!

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Lunedi Sostenibili has announced a competition very much after our own hearts: Made to Cultivate is gathering tools (both new, old or proposed) specific to domestic gardening.

As the image suggests with its myriad cooking tools, eating utensils, plastic containers, and household hardware, the aim of the competition is not to devise ways to make home gardening easier, but to “show the wide range of everyday objects and hidden techniques used in home gardens” to the world. Yes!

Here’s an excerpt from the brief, for context:

Home Gardening is becoming an increasingly common activity in our everyday urban culture. We live in small apartments above busy, polluted cities, yet we make a point of dedicating precious time to surrounding ourselves with greenery, creating miniature gardens on our windows sills and balconies and verandas. We make space for storing soil and seeds in the kitchen cupboard, cooking utensils mutate and adapt to new agricultural tasks. Some of us grow trees for their seasonal fruits, maybe for their sweet fragrance or maybe just for their beauty; the fact is, we all have little secrets on how to care for and grow our little home gardens. And that is what we are looking for. We want to open a window onto the world of DIY home gardening. Our intention is to create a visual anthology of domestic gardening know how, a resource available to all. An open source collection of tools, mechanisms, instructions and gardening techniques, to which everyone will have access.

There are several categories in which to enter: tools with great sentimental value, self-made tools and mechanisms, new life to a tool, specialized tools and utensils, and exotic objects. The objects may be pre-existing or designed especially for the show.

The deadline is April 30th; all objects will be exhibited in Milan in May (yes, after design week). It’s a tight turnaround, so head to the site and download the call for entries.

Made to Cultivate: Tools for Domestic Gardening
Deadline: April 30th, 2010

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The UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin is holding a competition for interdisciplinary Art & Science projects. The prize will be awarded on a biennial basis and is endowed with 7,500 Euros. Individuals and groups are eligible to participate (except full-time employees and students of the UdK Berlin). The deadline for entries is 31st May 2010.

Art and science are moving towards one another, discovering common issues and working methods. The creative, imaginative processes in the arts and sciences are similar, whereas the concrete realisation of their results tends to differ. Repeatedly, this difference is the source of productive tension and areas of friction. In all disciplines of the arts and sciences, further developments over recent decades have been characterised by mutual influences and efforts at differentiation. Today, traditional dividing lines between the spheres can no longer be maintained; they are being newly defined and presented in their permeability.

This competition aims to give the impetus and opportunity to artists (fine art, media, architecture, design, music, theatre, visual communication etc.) and scientists to work between the priorities of the arts or between the arts and science.

If you would like to participate, please click here for the address to request the registration form including detailed information. It is also available as a download.

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I’ll never understand why certain fairly major design events don’t post their own photo galleries to draw interest for their future events. So it goes with the International Bicycle Design Competition, which was won by Taiwanese designer Hsi Huang for his Shopping Bike, above; it transforms from a bicycle into a shopping cart, providing an on-board storage bin. Even cooler, after Huang submitted his design, the IBDC surprised him by prototyping one in CNC’d aluminum!

Speed Studio Design’s got a closer look at Huang’s design, which was crowned the winner at the 2010 Taipei Cycle Show (even though the award is considered a “2009″ prize). Also be sure to check out their fantastic Flickr gallery showing the other finalists.

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