Results of 4th NextGen PC Design Competition
The Fourth Next-Gen PC Design Competition, orginised by Microsoft and endorsed by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), throws down the gauntlet to budding industrial designers and seasoned professionals working in the field worldwide to apply their ingenuity, design prowess and creative flair and vision to the task of not merely give existing computing form factors a superficial makeover, but fundamentally rethinking the PC as we know it from the ground up.
This year’s competition issued an open call to entrants to dream up futuristic PC designs that give a new lease of life to people’s passions, such as travelling, music or photography. Contestants were challenged to come up with groundbreaking designs, not only featuring eye-catching aesthetics, but melding cutting-edge hardware with the latest software toward empowering people to follow their passions.
It certainly captured the imagination of the design community. The competition fielded 120 submissions from 32 countries that were as diverse as the passions they were aimed at empowering.
The winner's works are shown below:
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Napkin PC
1st Place Judges Award & Chairman’s Award Winner
Avery Holleman
The Napkin PC is a multi-user, multi-interface, modular computer designed for creative professionals to collaborate and bring their greatest ideas to life. |
WITHUS
2nd Place Judges
Taeho Wang, Minjoong Kim
WITHUS is the computer helping a preschool children shape the right values and human relationship by driving them into playing and learning with multi human interactions. Existing computer environment plays important and useful roles in various areas such as education, work, entertainment, and communication. However, it prevents direct interactions between two human or human and society. It is because current PCs are replacing the past human activities which need real contacts among people. It makes more difficult for young children to grow as an adult with right value and personality.
WITHUS solves the above problems of current PC environment. A kid as a user is attracted to enjoy more various and interesting contents with their friends by physically connecting his/hers with friends’ WITHUSes. Various firsthand experiences and collaborative activities through WITHUS promote the kids to grow as a social being by learning cooperation and compromise.
Backpacker's Diary 3rd Place Judges Award & Public’s Choice Award Winner
Zhongren Zhang, Chun Yang
Backpacker's diary is a PC concept that integrate with the form of traditional book, the target user is the enthusiastic travelling fans. In this "book", different pages include different functions, like media recording, solar recharging and EL illuminant. The approach of reading a book takes the traditional way of operating computer, which encourage those backpackers to experience and share more about their trips.
Two students' works from our school (Industrial Design programme, National Univeristy of Singapore) were selected as the Finalists:
conceito Finalist
huang xiaonan, Brian Lau
Digital painting PC for artists that allows:
1. flexible LCD screen can be carried around in the outdoors, and its translucency facilitates artiest to look through the screen to paint the sceneries.
2. digital pen interacts with LCD screen and the base. it has color sensing mechanism, gather color from real objects.
3. base is LED touch screen, showing color palette, and the pen can obtain color from the digital color palette.
4. the screen is scrolled up, and fixed to the supporting stand by using pen as the lock
INFO Live Finalist
Brian Law Chuan Chai, Huang Xiao Nan
INFO Live is an data organizer for connected internet world. It is able to transfer data information to any hardware and person any moment in time of need. In addition, it has a powerful information update system that alerts user of incoming information, e.g. email, documents, photos , video & etc in terms of ionic representation.