It is a pleasure to announce Real Time Chat by the Brazilian designer Layla Cavalcante as the winner of the competition. The project has been awarded with USD$1000 cash and we’re looking for a venue to exhibit it (if you are interested on exhibiting please contact me). Aside from the winner, the jury gave a honorary mention to the project Powdered Neem as Fast Food Condiment by Jude Genilo, Rahman Faizur Rafique and Ommul Fatema from the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.

And without further ado, the projects:

First Prize: Real Time Chat

How would you describe your proposal?
Using social media’s vocabulary my proposal is to make people start real-time conversations.

My project consists of a simple “add-on” patch that can be placed on your headphones. Each patch consists of a instant message status such as Online, Free for Chat and Busy. These patches are made of magnet and can be easily changed.

Imagine you are on the subway going home, while you are listening to your own music you can also be “Available” this is an opportunity to get to know people around you. It is also a great way to integrate the immigrant population because immigrants will have a opportunity to find out who is “Free for chat”.

What problem you are addressing?

Integrating the immigrant population.

What does it fix and how?
The problem I am addressing to is loneliness and how technology can close us inside our own world. I plan on solving it by making people interact more with their surroundings. Not only immigrants will benefit from it, everyone will.

I often see people on first world always using cellphones, facebook, ipods and my project is a simple solution that will build upon this behavior and bring people back to the real-world.

What makes it important?
It is a facilitator to start conversations. Communication is the most important form of interaction.

Imagine an immigrant living far away, on his way home he will now have the opportunity to start conversations, making the journey quicker and also interact with people around him in order to practice his english. It will be a win-win situation if the person talking to him was very lonely and spend most of his time with virtual friends.

How do the photos or renderings illustrate the concept?

I illustrated my concept with a modern poster. I tried to apply elements that are being used on the internet today to bring the attention of people that are into eletronics.

Minimal layout, illustrations, and soft colors.

I just thought about this because there is still oil leaking at the ocean right now.

I’m not asking to design things that do not need oil to be created. Just sit, read or watch the news about the Oil Spill in the Gulf.  Is not only about the peak of oil.

Oil is a production system plugged to war, property and destruction and we need to get rid of it.

Why we have to wait to run out of it and in the mid time having to deal with so much corruption and disaster?   We have limited oil reserves anyway and our future designs and solutions should be sustainable — as in not oil powered — yes, but mostly they should be more aware to the fact that we are all connected. (Watch this video)

Some people in Mexico are organizing a call to give some #RealPublicity to British Petroleum:

The Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been sold as one more natural disaster, like the eruption of a volcano or an earthquake. British Petroleum has been focused on minimize the real damage of this ecological disaster, and the responsability they had on preventing it.

While they announce on daily basis the amount of money they spent in covering up this disaster, is not enough to rescue their image, the damages are just not quantifiable.  The water of the Gulf of Mexico is contaminated with oil.

We are calling all designers to create #RealPublicity for #BP so we can call this disaster and the company responsible for it, by their fair name.  We need to prepare the road to repair this damage at any cost as well as, pushing to make  British Petroleum  and their executives respond to the international laws, for their liability and negligence towards our planet.

You can send your logos, collages, remixes and photos to make #RealPublicity to #BP to http://realpublicityforbp.tumblr.com/

(image via TobiX)

Although this contest was initiated to inspire the creation of solutions, I would like push the limits to encourage the development of critical design proposals that not necessarily look for solving particular problems in the fist world but to inspire thinking about them in a different way or that make evident new and critical visions about them. Why are those problems created in the first place? Are there any cultural reasons for them? How long have they existed for? Do all people see them as problems and why?

I believe Design For the First World has the potential to inspire very interesting reflections and foster future debates about what we understand by development and progress both in the first and third worlds, but I also see it as an opportunity to foster the creation of critical design approaches to come out from the “third” world.

I would be much happier to see critical and reflexive proposals than functional and practical solutions.

Alejandro.

Racism and discrimination is a problem everywhere, but we don’t need laws that make legal to practice it.  We don’t need laws that separate us even more. The international policy between Mexico and The United States has been handled completely by the government since forever. I lived in the United States for a while and i can assure you, that not all the society thinks like the Arizona Government. But also i know we all have been ignoring the real issue for many years now: we depend on each other.

I don’t recall any official situation or policy were mexican and american citizens could exchange their point of view about what kind of relationship we want between both countries. The decision and laws that rule all our relations as countries are always in handled by the government and, they are taking the wrong decisions.

How the citizens of both countries could exchange our point of views to decide together which kind of future we want to share?

I know we don’t want a border protected by laws that criminalize and prosecute the wrong people. If we go down the path of racism there are not going to be walls that could contain it. And if now we go after immigrants, then is going to be something else, because the ground to discriminate whatever threatens certain power structure, is going to be set.…and protected by the law.

This is a video of M.I.A. “Born Free”. It’s pretty heavy so beware, but well racism is pretty heavy.

Shall we stop this together?

There are other voices claiming that aid has done more harm than good, including our modest one, and I think it takes a local, like Ms Moyo to be as harsh. We, the ones who had to grow up, witness and live through the wonders and misseries of aid (some good has been done, I can recognize that), are the ones who should take the microphone now, just as Dambisa Moyo is doing. I know very little about economics, and its been said that there are few things as dangerous as an amateur economists so I’m not going to enter on the economic details of the proposition, but from where I stand what she says makes sense. And it does even if I’m not African but Latin American, where things are slightly better off.

We have been treated like children incapable of dealing with our own destiny and we somehow chose to believe it, and we have allowed to be treated that way. Our developing countries self-esteem is usually very low. When I was eight years old I read in school The Bear that Wasn’t by Frank Tashlin. It is still one of my favorite books, and one that speaks to this. After hibernating, the bear wakes up into what he believes is his cave, but has turned into a factory. The manager, the general manager, the third vicepresident, the second vicepresident, the first vicepresident, the president, the bears in the zoo and the bears in the circus convinced him that he’s not a bear –as he claims– but a lazy man, who needs to shave and wears a fur coat, and should start working in the factory with the rest of the men. In similar way we have been convinced that we are a mess, that we can’t handle our own governments and that we can’t take part of a global conversation by the socio political and economic dynamics of the world after being colonized.

In an episode of West Wing, a commission that advocates for fairness is trying to convince the government about the need to change the cartographical representation of the globe to the Peters Projection Map, more accurate at representing the actual size of the countries than the Mercato projection we are used to. In the Mercato projection, our mental map of the planet, the Northern hemisphere is drawn bigger than it is in relationship to the Southern and it is also drawn on top. Where else should we draw the north if is not in the top? you may ask in chorus with CJ Craig. Well, remember the Earth rotates? It can be on the bottom.

I would have loved to see an episode like that but starring designers and thinkers of the developing world. It is very important that we make a shift in the discourse and that we regain confidence and like the bear find the truth:“The truth is he was not a silly man…and he was not a silly bear, either”.

Sometimes i get a bit sad of knowing we could be in the greatest time of all time thanks to the internet, working together the developed and the developing world to find and share solutions to each other, instead of investing so much figuring out how to defend ourselves from the daily treats that censorship is posing to our basic freedoms. But also i must accept that the crusade against internet is producing so much innovation and even more awarness about their fundamental importance for everyone. I wonder if can be more pre-emptive when it comes to design solutions for internet problems?

It is really so basic: the internet cannot be controlled and the price for trying to do so, is just producing side effects that no one, including governments want.   Maybe the “third world” have to show the first world what are the effects in societies when not everyone is connected, and question them if they really want to go down that path?

The developed world migh have to take advantage of their connectivity  and must design for the Internet thinking in of it as a global service that affects even those that aren’t connected. If the current trend of trying to control communication keeps moving forward, it might not be only the countries of the developing world, the ones that will lack of internet as we know it.

Controlling internet is not going to make us move forward, but just stay stuck in a  state of partial and apparent democracy. We, need to  invest our energy in shaping the future  of the internet too. We cannot being stuck just defending it.

How do we expand the logic of the internet and its power outside the tubes and screens?  The developing world is full of Internet Zero models and using in them in places with more connectivity could spark amazing results. We have to make sure that this crisis is going to produce a stronger internet for all of us!

I like this idea:

Liberian blogger uses blackboard to inform

At first, it is shocking to promote something like giving birth: “Having more children? Aren’t we overcrowding the planet? What about the food? Are we going to be able to eat if we overpopulate?” OK. Breath. Calm down. The idea is not to encourage the First World to have families of 10.

There are two issues that derive from low birth rate: the first is a preoccupying unbalance between the amount of people that work and support the social security systems and those who are being supported by it. If there are less young people working and giving to the system than old persons being supported by it, the system collapses. The second issue is that as women tend to wait a few more years to reproduce in the developed world they are more likely to have difficulties or die when giving birth. Women that wait too long can also encounter fertility problems when they finally decide to have children incurring in expensive medical treatments that the state ends up financing.

While this is typically a problem mostly associated with Japan and Europe, the birth rate in the US falled in 2008 according to the New York Times. The reasons for this are uncertain, but it is speculated that the economy and a decline of the immigration may have to do with it.

In the UK, the number of woman dying while giving birth is surprisingly high and another of the dx1w problems is tied into this issue. As reported by The Guardian:

But while death rates appear to be coming down in a way nobody expected in the developing world, in the UK they have flat-lined. The reasons include a rise in the numbers of women having their babies later in life and an increase in those who are obese, increasing the risk of complications in pregnancy.

Designing solutions for the elderly

To keep with The Guardian as main source, there was a piece about the Japanese case a month ago in which some of the solutions aimed at taking care of the increasing elderly population are being showcased.

Japan is ageing faster than any other nation. By the end of this decade, there will be three pensioners for every child under 15 and before long, one in six people will be over 80. Its population will soon be falling by nearly a million people every year and doomsters predict that, some time in the next century, the last Japanese person will die.

The problem here is not only that the pyramid of supporters vs supported is being inverted but also the topic of alienation and isolation, a very First World issue.  Some of the design solutions that have come out for this problem are fantastic. The Paro pet idea sort of creep me out at first, but the videos of it at work and the results are completely wonderful. The thing is just too cute to dispute.

Fastcompany also has a write up about France and Japan’s approaches to Robots for the aging population.

What fascinates me about this idea and the reason why I use it as an example of the submissions we are expecting from our competitors is that it takes a specific context, a specific problem and looks for a solution that will address that issue without an extravagant use of materials or tools. It is a clever idea, right to the point and it effectively conduces to change behaviours.

Now competitors, I know you can do even better than this.

You should really watch what happens in this walk in this great documentary:  Illegal Border Crossing Park by VBS.tv.

Yes, in Mexico we are beyond surreal and this tourist walk ideally wouldn’t have to exist.  However this tourist attraction shows us that space can be adapted to teach and learn a little bit about what social justice means.  For both mexicans and americans, maybe is a bit necessary to address that together with Palestina and Israel — and besides all of our cultural differences — we might be the only neighbors in the world, divided by so much difference in wealth. And, the implications and consequences of this, start (and end for many)  at the very physical edge of our differences: the border.

Ironically, if we ever wake up and achieve a zone were spatial justice is guarantee for both countries, it might be right on this geographical border.  Maybe Disneyland needs a new theme ride?