DesignBytes

10 students from Finland's Lahti University of Applied Sciences have designed a collection of essential furniture items for those affected by natural disasters and the refugee crisis.

Some design flaws are obvious, but what about the subtler forms of bad design, the flaws of which make our lives ever so slightly harder every day.

Hyundai Motor Co. has opened a hulking new design studio for its Hyundai and Genesis brands that will allow the automaker to work on 24 separate vehicles at the same time. The main goal of the new studio will be to accelerate the product development process.

Talking Hands is a migrant-run design workshop in Italy where asylum seekers make and sell furniture, embroidery and textiles.

Many designers hold onto the notion that creativity can only be done by a human, that machines can’t make the leap into the creative process, and that the creativity of humans is beyond being mechanized.

Designers have the crucial task of thinking about what our future will look like and how we will interact with it.

When creating new products and technologies, designers tend towards the average user which can exclude the elderly and people with physical disabilities.

Adidas’s Futurecraft 4D is the first 3D-printed running shoe to deliver on the promise of mass customization. But it hasn’t been easy getting here.

Just another design problem? Not quite. But here’s how one designer turns his anxiety into creativity.

Reporter Roger Renstrom of Plastics News takes a closer look at the role of plastics in #IDSAIDEA 2017 winning product designs.

Jaguar has revealed what it calls the steering wheel’s future: an artificially intelligent, voice-activated steering wheel that's removable from the car.

A Cornell professor has partnered with Google, IDEA 2017 Gold winner, to develop robots that help children with autism learn to react emotionally in social situations.

A new exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection will show how design plays a fundamental part in the healthcare sector, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Officials announced three significant programs developments that will be rolled out during the fall semester.

IBM CEO Thomas Watson Jr. famously declared “good design is good business.” Jeneanne Rae, IDSA has the numbers to prove it. In 2013, Rae, founder of Virginia-based consultancy Motiv Strategies, devised the Design Value Index (DVI), an investment tool she says shows that companies that integrate design thinking into corporate strategy can outpace industry peers by as much as 228%.

Despite its solid economic growth and sizable population (the largest in the world), China is noticeably absent from many conversations and events surrounding design.

German carmaker BMW has unveiled the basic design for the full-production electric version of the next Mini car.

A partially 3-D printed wheelchair that is custom-fit to its owner. It not only looks cool, it uses some smart design tricks to make pushing yourself a little easier.

Aptly called the Fast Food Furniture series, the colorful seating aims to have unpretentious fun with product design by fusing it with icons of American pop culture.

For her graduate work at the Royal College of Art, Dani Clode created a wearable third thumb that can help its user carry more objects, squeeze lemons or play complex chords on the guitar.

After her own negative experiences with mental health services, a graduate designer developed a self-assessment kit that lets users figure out the kind of help they need.

“People use products to compensate for their need for dominance,” says Ahreum Maeng. Over a series of studies, her team set out to understand why certain products evoke that dominance while others don’t.

Musk revealed an image of a person sitting in what looks like a spacecraft cabin, wearing a bright white-and-silver spacesuit. Musk said that the suits have already been tested in "double vacuum pressure," although these suits are likely not intended to be worn outside the spacecraft. He also noted that it was "incredibly hard" to balance aesthetics and function.

“Color,” Laurie Pressman says, “is the language of life.” This is just one of many color-related phrases that Pressman, VP of the Pantone Color Institute, repeats like mantras: red is passion and energy; blue is seriousness and stability.