2010's Best Designed Products

Hi friends this afternoon I want to share an interesting article of 2010's Best Designed Products found on fastcompany.com. Enjoy it all!

2010's Best Designed Products

By: Linda TischlerJuly 1, 2010

 

The gold-winning OneDown mousetrap swings upright, using a rodent's own weight to keep it trapped. | The Hwaro (Korean for "fire oven") warms, purifies, and humidifies air -- and looks far sexier than the typical space heater. | LaCie's USB flash drives were judged "worthy of being on a keychain."

The winners of the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards can help you ride the waves, grill a burger, catch varmints, and save the earth.

Brazil's Guarana Jesus soda 

got a consumer-driven makeover; 

this new can was chosen via SMS and online voting.

The Microsoft Zune HDinterface, 

the judges said, "redefines interaction models."

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 The minutes are ticking down, and a fleet of town cars idle outside the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, ready to leave for the airport. Inside the building, though, the 18 design luminaries serving as jurors of the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) -- the field's top honors -- are unmoved. Over the previous 48 hours, they have blazed through a pool of 1,900 entries from 28 countries, choosing 38 gold-medal winners. And now they are stuck, deadlocked over the final selection for Best in Show.

Choosing the medalists in some of the 18 categories -- everything from medical devices to home decor -- was easy. And seeing the reach of modern design has been exhilarating. For instance, Thomas Meyerhoffer's elegant surfboard takes top honors in leisure and recreation, while the judges deem Ideo's poignant posters for pharma giant Lilly "a simple but beautiful moment of creativity," awarding it gold in design research.

Best in Show proves to be the knottiest problem. The four finalists affirm the wild diversity of the competition; they are so different that judging them against one another is like picking between apples and oysters. There is the packaging for Method laundry detergent, which the jurors love for its ability to change daily consumer behavior. There is the user interface on Microsoft's Zune music player -- "There's poetry in this," one juror argues. The minimalism of the Slingbox multimedia broadcaster has many fans. "If this were the standard," one juror jokes, "it would put us all out of business." And then there is the innovative low-cost latrine from Cambodia, modest on physical beauty, perhaps, but high on social responsibility.

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