Category Archives: Design

If GPS Could Talk…

 

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Forsman & Bodenfors wants to make sure drivers “drive 25 to keep kids alive,” and they’ve found an ingenious way to do it. Talking GPS are standard features in modern vehicles, but the agency has conceptualized an app that will switch the voice on the GPS to a child’s when within range of a school, daycare, or other area populated by children.

It’s currently available in Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and comes pre-loaded with all schools and daycare centers in the Nordic region.

The agency hopes that this will serve as an audio reminder to drive carefully and watch for children, reducing the number of accidents in school zones and other kid-friendly areas.

What Sparks Our Fire: Using innovation and unconventional problem-solving to draw attention to an often-ignored safety hazard

Ain’t Got No Type

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Love Times New Roman? Have a passion for Helvetica? Good news for designer geeks: You can now wear your favorite font as eyewear.

After the initial success of their first line, Wieden & Kennedy Tokyo and Oh My Glasses have collaborated to launch a new line of TYPE glasses, glasses inspired by different fonts, with names like Garamond and styles ranging from “Light” to “Bold”. Times New Roman is one of three new models that made their debut at a Tokyo pop-up shop last week.

Each pair of TYPE glasses are meant to reflect characteristics of their respective fonts, like lines, curves, and shapes. Each font also comes in “light,” “regular,” and “bold” to denote thickness of the frames.

“As the choice of typeface affects expression in written communication, subtle design differences in eyeglasses frames change the impression of the person who wears them,” Wieden & Kennedy Tokyo state on their website.

What Sparks Our Fire: Products that finds new ways to showcase beautiful elements of design.

The New “Viral”

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Vaccination has been a highly controversial topic in recent years, resulting in a slew of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the School Vaccination Law in California, which mandates that children that attend public school must be vaccinated.

British Columbia’s ImmunizeBC and agency Rethink Vancouver have teamed up to create a unique mailing campaign to promote vaccination, appropriately called “Viral”. The trailer for the campaign states that “Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet, but as you know, it’s making a comeback.”

However, the kicker is the actual mailing campaign: when exposed to sunlight, the UV-responsive ink on the paper appears suddenly in a rash of bright red spots, reminiscent of–you guessed it–measles. The alarming card shows how fast measles can spread, and reminds recipients that “not vaccinating your children puts us all at risk”.

This comes after particularly alarming reports of measles spreading throughout the United States, including an outbreak at Disneyland, and reminds parents to vaccinate their children or risk them being a public health hazard.

What Sparks Our Fire: Ingenious campaigns that post important public health reminders

Tech Goes Green

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Sustainability has been a growing trend in business for years now as climate change becomes a more prevalent threat, however, now technology companies especially have realized that sustainability is a good investment.

Sustainability “ensures business continuity by conserving resources,” and now more than ever, economic and environmental sustainability are vital to businesses’ longevity and productivity.

In 2014, Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that climate change-related natural disasters are costing Unilever at least $300 million a year. To combat this, several companies have come up with ways to conserve energy and other natural resources.

Creating environmental products is one such step. Samsung, for example, has taken the lead and released a solar-powered laptop, as well as three “green” mobile phones made of corn starch bioplastic and have energy-efficient chargers and recyclable packaging.

In order to ensure the future of the planet–and technology–it’s up to other companies to follow in Samsung’s small carbon footprints.

What Sparks Our Fire: Companies taking on a greater accountability for their sustainability and making moves to make sustainability a universal practice.