Carbon Collaborations Capture 3 Good Design Awards

Chicago Athenaeum’s Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies honored Carbon Design Group and its clients with three 2011 Good Design Awards.

As part of Carbon’s long history with the Redmond giant, two Microsoft/Carbon collaborations were recognized in the Electronics category. The first, the Microsoft Express Mouse, was developed working closely with the Microsoft Hardware User Experience Team. The playful, affordable Express Mouse challenges the perception that wired mice are inherently uncool. In truth, wired mice are cool. They don’t run out of batteries, they never lose connection, they’re more environmentally friendly, and they cost less than their wireless cousins. The colored cable is treated as an integral part of the product, rather than as an afterthought. It wraps around the product, forming a visual and tactile bumper. The cord exits from the front left corner, adding character and relieving cable stress for right-handed users. The simple, clean silhouette allows the cable to remain highlighted and makes wired cool again.

The second Microsoft/Carbon collaboration to garner a 2011 Good Design Award was the Microsoft Touch Mouse—the first multi-touch mouse from Microsoft. The Microsoft Hardware User Experience Team worked with Carbon to explore what it meant to give form to a multi-touch mouse experience. The final result clearly communicates that it’s a mouse and that it’s an entirely new kind of mouse. To facilitate multi-touch commands, which involve a wide array of finger combinations and strokes, the multi-touch surface extends seamlessly across the top and down the sides of the mouse. A subtle indication tells users where the left and right-click zones are. The touch surface itself is indicated by a finely textured pattern that references the underlying capacitive touch array. By merging a multi-touch surface with the form factor of a traditional mouse, the Touch Mouse was designed to introduce multi-touch computing to a new audience.

Recognized in the Medical category, the PleuraFlow® Active Tube Clearance® System is the first chest tube with a mechanism for actively clearing blood clots. After heart or lung surgery, chest tubes are installed to drain fluids and air. Unfortunately, these tubes routinely clog with blood clots and debris, putting the patient at risk for potentially fatal complications. With PleuraFlow, a guide sleeve outside the tube is connected via magnetic coupling to the internal guide wire. This allows the nurse to manipulate the wire by shuttling the guide sleeve back and forth along the tube. This configuration enables nurses to prevent blockages by quickly clearing debris build-up—even the unseen build-up inside the chest cavity—without breaking the sterile field. Designed and developed for Clear Catheter Systems and manufactured by Xeridiem, PleuraFlow aims to deliver better patient outcomes while reducing pain in the post operative recovery after heart surgery.