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The Earth Awards recognize design that offers groundbreaking solutions to the ecological and social challenges of the 21st century. The 2009 recipient is Neri Oxman, acknowledged for her work in interdisciplinary design and design research.

From her profile at Materialecology:

Neri Oxman is an architect and researcher whose work attempts to establish new forms of experimental design and novel processes of material practice at the interface of design, computer science, material engineering and ecology. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture and previously a medical scholar at the Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, she is currently based at MIT where she is a presidential research fellow and a PhD candidate in Design Computation. Transcending disciplinary and professional boundaries, Oxman’s work pioneers Material Computation as a design paradigm beyond typological expression. She promotes the aesthetics of material formation and behavior as a scientific contribution to ecological activism.

Oxman on performance-driven design:

A piece by Lev Bratishenko from triplecanopy:

The Roma build their palaces just like the rest of us, one cinder block at a time…

TIMOSORA, ROMANIA - Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland.

Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads.

“How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit.

More…

From Kate Rockwood at Fast Company:

The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.

Here, in the Pittsburgh offices of MAYA (”most advanced yet acceptable”) Design, a mashup of design firm and tech-research lab, these people are students. Given 30 minutes to imagine a TiVo-like car radio, they’ve built prototypes with construction paper, markers, and stickers. Chris Pacione, director of MAYA’s innovation boot camp, is playing an average consumer — and he can’t find the on button. “Some companies are not used to working across silos — design, marketing, engineering,” Pacione says later. “They still think design is something that happens at the end: ‘Should we paint it red? Or blue?’ They’ll have brilliant minds working on a project for two years before it hits shelves, and it’s not until then they know it’s deeply flawed.” More…

The week, London is celebrating its annual London Design Festival - providing a platform for creative work and the exploration of over 200 design events and activities. Throughout the week, the public is invited to attend events, exhibits, and seminars - with special exhibits and openings hosted by the likes of the Design Museum, V&A Museum and Serpentine Gallery. News and updates are posted on the London Design Festival’s News page.

Eric A. Taub from The New York Times writes…

LED light bulbs, with their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, have grabbed the consumer’s imagination.

But an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes, create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colors, just like their inorganic LED cousins. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible. More…

Rachel Pulfer of Inhabitat.com…

Danish design consultancy Index: recently announced the winners of the 2009 Index:Award, an international design competition that highlights the scale of the problems we face globally, while rewarding design work that points the way towards intelligent solutions. The prize is 100,000 euros per winner in five categories: “Body“, “Home“, “Work“, “Play” and “Community“. This year’s prizes have been chosen from more than 700 entries, all of which had to meet the theme: Design to Improve Life. More…