RKS Honored with Seven GOOD Design Awards

(Chicago) RKS was honored this month to receive Seven Good Design Awards across the medical, electronics, and personal categories of the prestigious awards competition. Honored designs ranged from laboratory automation solutions to reusable water bottles, a new smart phone for the blind, to a mobile-optimized ventilator and an improved dental extrusion syringe.

Founded by Ray and Charles Eames, for more than 60 years GOOD DESIGN has bestowed international recognition upon the world's most prominent designers and manufacturers for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality, and for stretching the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary product and consumer design. The awards have been conferred annually by the Chicago Athenaeum since 1950.

A New Star Takes the Stage

RKS Design and Fender Musical Instruments Corporation today announced the debut of Gig Stand, now available at music retailers nationwide. With its small size, collapsible but durable construction, and weighing little more than the average lead cable, Fender® Gig Stand is perhaps the decade’s most refreshing innovation in guitar stand mobility. The sleek and sturdy foldable design prevents damage to valuable instruments while saving artists time and precious ‘case space.’ A distinctive departure from bulkier instrument stands with trapeze-like construction and screw tighteners, Fender® Gig Stand is the perfect attendant for every musician, and now has a back-stage pass to join the entourage everywhere.

See more on Dexigner.

Kor Aura Wins 2011 iF Design Award

RKS' most recent design collaboration with long-time partner KOR Water, the Aura(r) hydration vessel, was released this year and has already been recognized with a 2011 International iF Design Award.

Aura is the lightest and most affordable offering in KOR's line of premium eco-friendly hydration solutions, retaining all the key design attributes customers have come to love from the brand. Winners were determined by and international jury of design experts, and the competition was again hosted by iF International Forum Design GmbH, part of iF GmbH. Open to manufacturers and designers, the annual iF Product Design Awards honor all areas of product design, and have become a globally recognized seal of design excellence.

2011 Spark Awards Announced

The 2011 Spark Awards were announced this month by Executive Director Peter Kuchnicki and RKS is honored to be recognized with two winning designs—an overall competition winner for Nuance™ and a Bronze Award for our new smartphone design for the blind.

RKS’ design for Discus Dental (Philips) was an awarded design solution that helps dental assistants perform their jobs more effectively, while saving time and money in the process of extruding Discus’ new universal composite used for tooth repairs and fillings. The Orion-18 is a new smart phone designed for the blind community, that will soon bring the world to people’s fingertips with the help of great design and integrated features in one wireless solution.

12th Annual National Design Awards

The Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum celebrated outstanding achievement in design this week with it's 12th annual National Design Awards Program. RKS is proud to have been recognized by the National Design Awards for the firm’s recent portfolio of work in product design, and honored to be a 2011 finalist following the firm’s first entry into the competition.

The National Design Awards were conceived to honor the best in American design, and the program works annually to demonstrate the importance of design while increasing awareness of its impact on the quality of daily life. "The work of this year’s National Design Awards winners represents extraordinary solutions to the design problems central to the landscape of daily life, from how we dress, shape our personal and private spaces, frame communication and interact with the world at large," said Bill Moggridge, Director of Cooper-Hewitt.

Business Line reviews Predictable Magic

Business LIne reviews Predictable Magic: "A book that comes as an appeal to reason, especially for those who search in vain for consume insights only among dreary research numbers and complex marketing models."

Read the full review on Business Line

Design Education Can Not be Passively Learned, Nor Painlessly Learned

Over the past year I've read and participated in discussions about design school and the quality of education students currently receive, and thought it would be valuable to share some of my own experiences and what they've taught. The design program I attended in the '70s was a new start-up, with 30-to-1 student-teacher ratios until my senior year. We quickly learned that our instructors weren't equipped to teach everything we needed to know—quite the opposite. Our program's lead professor, in particular, was really behind the times and set in his ways. Disconnected from industry, he had little appetite for embracing new techniques, approaches and technological innovation.

Out of our collective dilemma, we pushed ourselves into new collaborations and individual inquiry, discovering how our profession was led and changing. The understanding and perspective gained has served us well throughout our careers and taught an important lesson—you can't be taught design in the traditional sense of lectures and labs, but you can learn it! We also learned that our design instructors functioned more like coaches—able to provide direction and strategy, offer the voice of experience and inspiration. However, developing and honing the skill set required a commitment to lifelong learning as an individual process.

Read more on core77

People Are the Puck

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been” - Wayne Gretzky

The Great One’s well-known words are often repeated in corporate corridors during discussions about understanding market trends. That is typically where the conversation comes to an abrupt end, because few can elaborate on how to anticipate these trends with any reliability and predictability.

The reality these discussions generally miss is that people are the puck. If you want to know how to be best positioned for business success, you have to understand where they are going. Everything else is secondary, dynamic, and highly arbitrary. Think about it. Technologies will change, distribution channels for content will change, usage environments will change. People stay more or less the same. They stay the same but are never simple. People (consumers) are both logical and irrational, motivated by opportunity and emotion, full of contradiction, impacted by economic conditions, and often difficult to define.

Read the rest of Ravi’s article on Harvard Business Review

A. Meunier: Paris, Comédie-Française, 18th century watercolour

The Art and Theater of Getting Creative

Innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box, unbounded thinking, lateral thought, design thinking—all terms that have gone into and out of fashion, but which hold the same goal—unconventional and novel approaches to problem solving. Everyone is trying to find the new twist and harness the insight and innovation contained within their organizations in order to better prosper amid today's competition and uncertainty. With every new label there seems to be a wave of interest, speculation and further inquiry into how one goes about making both individuals and groups more effective at creatively tackling challenges to arrive at novel solutions. However, today's challenge isn't coming up with what to call 'it,' but how to quickly and effectively set the foundation for...

Read the rest of this article on Core 77

RKS Exhibition in Sao Paulo

CEO Ravi Sawhney shared some photos from Brazil of the RKS Exhibition, which will be on display for the next six weeks at the Panamericana Escola de Arte e Design.

Sawhney is speaking this week as part of Ciclo de Conhecimento (Cycle of Knowledge) in Sao Paulo and Curitiba. For additional media/photo coverage of the event, click here.