Catnip Magazine

May Design Competitions Listing

24 chances to be rewarded for creative brilliance.

(deserving dog proudly wearing tiara from Wet Nose Photos)

DEADLINES

• Socio Design Foundation Integrated Competition — register by 30 April 2010
Craft and clearly communicate your idea for a design school that fosters a socially-aware education for its students.

• International Lace Award — 30 April 2010
“Challenge conventional notions of lace and its application in the areas of fashion, the built environment and digital multimedia. … The Award defines lace as an openwork structure whose pattern of spaces is as important as the solid areas.”

• Street Furniture Light — 30 April 2010
The objective of the competition is to design an object that qualifies as a street furniture while retaining its primary purpose, lighting.

• Just Sit! Chairs and Stools design — 30 April 2010
The actual deadline says “April 31th” which is sorta ghetto. But it’s a call for submissions into a new book about, uh huh, chairs and stools.

• One Good Chair — 1 May 2010
The theme is Minimum/Maximum. Can you design a chair that is almost nothing and almost everything at the same time?

• Bench Jewelers Passion Award — 1 May 2010
Submit your finished jewelry pieces or CAD renderings designed after January ‘09. Awards will be presented at the Bench Jewelers Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

• Electrolux Design Lab Competition — 1 May 2010
Open to undergraduate and graduate students to design home appliances for small domestic spaces.

• The Earth Awards — 10 May 2010
Do you have an idea that’s going to change the future? Submit your invention/innovation for a chance at $50k and a presentation to venture capitalists in London. Categories are: built environment, product, future, systems, fashion, & social justice.

• Game Changers —  11 May 2010
Design a game that aims to create change by improving lives or inspiring new behaviors.

• MINI Countryman —  11 May 2010
Create a 2D concept for a feature to be added to the MINI Center Rail of the new MINI Countryman car. Pretty nice prizes, like a trip to the Paris Motor Show.

• Porch Shed Design Competition — 15 May 2010
Come up with the ultimate porch for a shed, it may be a simple classic design or a complete wrap around, it could be very clean lines or richly decorated the choice is yours.

• TANGS Green Tote Design Challenge — 16 May 2010
TANGS is calling for all designers to propose a new look for the Green Tote. Get creative and choose from the 3 sizes provided and [include the logo] in your design.

• The Living Climate Change Video Challenge — 25 May 2010
Create a video of no more than 2 minutes in length that depicts how you see climate change impacting or shaping our lives over the next 20 to 30 years.

HEADS UP

• Mobile Voter Registration & Info Center Design — 15 June 2010
Pratt Manhattan Gallery  present[s] a public art competition to design mobile voter registration centers that will tour New York City from September 15 through November 2, 2010. The goal of the competition… is to provide visual political stimulation during the voter registration process and to inform the public about the democratic process.

• Crochet Guild of America — 15 June 2010
Join the CGOA and enter your amazing crochet creations, anything from fashion and accessories to toys and home decor.

• Seoul International Design Competition — 13 July 2010
“The ‘design for all’ objective is made to increase the efforts and the pursuit of design production that can be shared by all, removing emotional and physical barriers by becoming an universal communicative social solution.” Competition is open to anyone, anywhere!

• Betacup Challenge — 15 June 2010
Submit an idea that could help reduce the waste of the 58 billion paper coffee cups that get thrown away, unrecycled, each year.

• Food Design — 15 June 2010
Design with food; design for food; and a tasting kit design: this is probably the coolest concept competition on this entire list. And even if you have no plans to enter, you should jump over to Dexigner and see the image for this contest. It’s prosciutto juxtaposed with a linen sheet. Cured meat and textiles are both really my thing.

• EVOLVE — 30 June 2010
Design a rug. Open only to full-time professionals in the interior design industry (products, textiles, stylists, consultants) that are also residents of New Zealand or Australia.

• Carpet Vista — 18 July 2010
Design a rug. Open to anyone, I think.

• HABARI Stool Design — 20 August 2010
The objective:  present new design ideas that combine the use of modern but simple manufacturing technology with the advantages of typical African Stools. Best idea(s) will go into production. A selection of stool designs selected by the Jury will be exhibited during the 2010 Vienna Design Week.

• The Concrete Classroom— register by 15 September 2010
Students in the field of architecture are invited to present conceptual designs for a new education and training facility for a state concrete association.

• Playable 2010 — 1 October 2010
Submit your designs for Playable Art / Playable Sites / Playable DIY Sites / Playable Kids. The competition will culminate in a conference on designing for play at Georgia Tech.

• Copper and the Home — 30 November 2010
Design a decorative object for the home using copper or copper alloys that exploit the intrinsic qualities of these metals. Separate categories for students and professionals under 40 years of age. (p.s. The site is pretty clunky. To read the competition details go to News>newsletter>#07)

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For a variety of reasons, too complicated to explain in this short intro paragraph, there’s no NSFW column from me this week. All will be revealed soon, but suffice it to say that any or all of the following are involved: 1) a semi-secret project 2) an unexpected career turn 3) the future of media 4) a plume of volcanic ash from Iceland.

What’s important, though, is that I don’t want this space to lie empty for the week. So how fortunate that on Tuesday Andrey Ternovskiy from Chatroulette stopped by the office to say hello. And in keeping with the new TC policy of pointing a camera at all of our visitors, I bullied him into a video interview.

Andrey, as you probably know, is from Moscow. And despite the fact that his English is far better than my Russian, his accent – coupled with my ineptitude as an interviewer – did not make for the most gripping viewing. However, there is one clip that stands out, both in clarity and in providing an insight into Andrey’s future strategy for Chatroulette. It came just after I asked Andrey what new features he was planning to add to the service using all the VC money he’s allegedly in town to raise…

As he explains in the video, Andrey is worried that when people meet on Chatroulette they frequently decide to keep in touch by exchanging Facebook or Skype details. This is something Andrey wants to discourage, preferring instead to add that functionality to Chatroulette. I asked him to clarify whether he means adding features that will make it easier for users to connect through third party services, or whether he literally means he wants to stop users leaving the site at all – preferring, Veruca Salt style – to keep them all for himself. Andrey was clear: “I don’t like connecting third parties” he said, citing the fact that many Chatroulette users would like to keep in touch with their new friends while retaining the anonymity the service affords them.

Given the general Silicon Valley obsession with openness and the decentralisation of the social graph, Andrey’s plan to build walls and lock users in, ostensibly for their own protection, seems odd. Even, one might even say, Soviet. It’ll be interesting to see if VCs in the Valley agree.

Another thing that stuck me as I spoke to Andrey was how similar his story sounds to that of an old friend of mine, Alex Tew. Alex, for those with short memories, was the kid who – while still at university – built the Million Dollar Homepage, and in doing so was feted as the web’s biggest marketing genius. VC’s courted him, media outlets around the world profiled him – but like all child stars, the fame was short lived and Alex soon has to return to the realities of running his business and figuring out what to do next.

Given the parallels, I couldn’t resist calling Alex on Skype and asking him, firstly, whether he thought Chatroulette would prove to be a sustainable business and, if so, how – especially given that the site is basically “a sex crime waiting to happen”. Here’s what he had to say…

I still think the Million Dollar Homepenis idea is a winner.

Normal column service resumes next week.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on a roll. While he’s probably had better days than today, he’s lately been shooting off emails left and right in response to customers’ concerns. We just were sent what appears to be one such Jobs response, sent last week surrounding the whole Mark Fiore situation. And it’s a good one.

When questioned about Apple’s role as moral police in the App Store, Jobs responds that “we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.” Better, is what he said next: “Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.“

Last week, another Jobs email about the Fiore situation was published in which Jobs called the situation a “mistake.” He noted the same thing in this email, but the porn/Android link is the key here. Assuming this email is legit, this isn’t the first time Jobs has suggested users try Android if they want porn. Earlier this month, during a Q&A session after the iPhone 4.0 OS event, Jobs said:

You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there.

This is noteworthy both because it’s funny, and because Apple and Google are in the early stages of a war that’s brewing between the iPhone and Google’s Android platform. Jobs is apparently going to keep taking these jabs from what he considers to be the moral high-ground.

Read the full back-and-forth below:

Matthew Browing, an Apple customer wrote the following to Jobs:

Steve,
I was converted to Apple products with the announcement of the iPhone 3G. (My friends have been trying to convince me for years.) Since then I’ve purchased 4 iPhones, 2 computers, several routers, and miscellaneous other items. Unfortunately, I’m really starting to have a philosophical issue with your company. It appears that more and more Apple is determining for it’s consumers what content they should be able to receive. For instance, the blocking of Mark Fiore’s comic app (due to being political satire) or blocking of what Apple considers to be porn.

I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck – I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But… that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.

Apple’s role isn’t moral police – Apple’s role is to design and produce really cool gadgets that do what the consumer wants them to do.

Thanks for listening

-Matthew

In response, Jobs replied:

Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and Android phone.

Yes, Jobs apparently made a typo (and -> an), but we checked the IP headers on the email and they are legit. Of course, these can be faked, but it seems hard to believe that someone would go to all the work of sending us an email in which they changed all the IPs or manipulated all the time elements only to attach their real name and real email address to send it to us.

And no, the email doesn’t end with the usual “sent from my iPhone” or the new favorite, “sent from my iPad,” but again, looking at the header information, that’s because it was sent using Apple Mail. Jobs has been known to do this in the past (and recently) as well.

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Last summer, artist Molly Dilworth began creating physical art for the digital landscape. How? By painting large-scale, rooftop murals that could be viewed and photographed via satellite, eventually appearing on Google Earth’s virtual globe. As she explains on her project page, the idea was motivated by her desire to characterize an unconsidered element of the urban environment:

“The view of our built environment from the satellite is surprisingly unconsidered. Our buildings are clearly not designed for the bird’s-eye view, we put the HVAC, water towers and vents – the things we don’t want to look at- up there, and why not? Until recently it was mostly out of sight, out of mind. The landscape from above in our cities is remarkably bland and anonymous; it’s hard to imagine the façade of a building with so little ornamentation or identifying features.”

Her first piece (pictured above) appears on a rooftop in the neighborhood of Chelsea in New York City. It took her a full month to complete, during which she would work each day for “as long as the sun was out.” We were floored by Molly’s images of the work-in-progress (below), and even more impressed by her pitch video, in which she offers a charmingly modest take on her wildly ambitious endeavor. Watch the video — and support her endeavor — at her project page, here. For more images of the mural, check out her Flickr page, here.

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In the cyberdelic daze of the early 1990s, Mondo 2000 was the publication-of-record. Founded by our dear pal RU Sirius, it was not just a magazine (with an expiration date), but a “strange attractor” for freaks interested in the new edge of computers, pranks, digital art, fringe culture, psychedelics, consciousness, weird science, and hacking. In fact, Mondo was one of the main magnets that drew me to San Francisco in 1992. To chronicle the Mondo moment and its impact, RU has launched a new project to create a Web history and book, and he’s created a Kickstarter page to gather funding to make it happen. From the project page for Mondo 2000: An Open Source History (cover gallery above from Mondo2000.net):

An Open Source History is a web project and a book. All those who touched directly upon the history of the scene/magazine (including the earlier versions, High Frontiers and Reality Hackers) will be invited to write — or, in some cases, speak on video or audio — their stories and perceptions. Additionally, small groups of people will be encouraged to get together and record conversations. These will be posted on a private page available only to other participants. Participants will have the opportunity to insert comments into the text or add fresh entries.

At the end of the process, estimated to take approximately two years, a collaboratively-edited electronic document will be released on the web. A more closely-edited print book composed of selections from this process — edited by Ken Goffman aka R.U. Sirius (that’s me!) with Morgan Russell — will be published. Finally, the video footage might be rolled into a Mondo 2000 film documentary.

I will be a major participant in this process, essentially writing my own full and complete memoir of this time and posting most of these in fragments on the collaborative site.

Mondo 2000’s history is an exhilarating and weird tale of early digital culture, drugs, sex, surrealism, gonzo anthropology, death, digital culture, media hype, conspiracy paranoia, celebrities, transhumanism, irresponsible journalism, appropriation, hackers, pranks, theft, fun and desktop publishing. This mostly true article from the SF Weekly tells only part of the story.

Many extraordinarily talented writers, artists, scientists, and outsider philosophers participated in the Mondo 2000 experience and there are marvelous tales to be told. If we can get even 20% of them to participate, we may have final proof that collaborative narratives don’t have to suck.

MONDO 2000: An Open Source History

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Having finished the manuscript for his next novel, Zero History, William Gibson is taking a break from fiction by answering a wide-ranging set of questions from the readers on his blog. His answers are really good and interesting. This one should be graven in marble over every beginning writer’s desk.

A “Creator’s block” sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer’s block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. “It sprang whole and perfect from my brow” as opposed to “I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me”. I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber’s idea of “termite art”.

QUESTIONS

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Yesterday, my Awesome Friend Leah introduced me to the wonders of Animal Review, the blog that reviews animals, as though they were books, albums or snooty French restaurants. For instance, in a contrarian drubbing, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Christopher Hitchens laid into Mother Teresa, Animal Review gave pandas an “F” (later revised to an “F+”), saying,

… whatever their charms or ability to symbolize goodwill between us and a brutal Communist regime, the panda species leaves much to be desired.

My initial skepticism—isn’t this just a rip-off of F**k You, Penguin?—was quickly laid to rest, however, when I realized that Animal Review was about more than comic insults directed at wildlife. There are real science facts in here, people. In fact, it’s kind of a fun way to learn the basics of comparative zoology. Fun facts I’ve learned/been reminded of just reading through the archives today:

• Jellyfish totally use the same hole for eating and pooping. But it’s not like they care, as they have no brain.
• Killer bees release a rage-inducing alarm pheromone that smells like bananas.
• The mating behavior of the Ceratias holboelli anglerfish involves males biting females and then releasing an enzyme that slowly causes their flesh and bloodstreams to merge, and his eyes and internal organs to melt away. Basically, he becomes a gonad, attached to the female, to use when she sees fit.

Image courtesy Flickr user fox_kiyo, via CC

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A teenager in Iowa made her prom dress — and a matching vest for her date — out of blue gum wrappers. It’s actually kind of pretty!

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From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory today, this gorgeous new image from The Herschel Space Observatory: “a cosmic garden of budding stars, each expected to grow to 10 times the mass of our sun.” The image was taken using infrared light by Herschel, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation. More here, including higher-resolution formats. (thanks, Whitney Clavin)

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Johannes from the Austrian net-kook-art group Monochrom sez, “monochrom is a magazine object appearing in telephone book format, which is published by the art/tech group of the same name. monochrom came into being in the mid-1990s as a fanzine for cyberculture, science, theory, cultural studies and the archaeology of pop culture in everyday life. Its collage format is reminiscent both of the early DIY fanzines of the punk and new wave underground and of the artist books of figures such as Dieter Roth, Martin Kippenberger and others. With a great deal of forced discontinuity, a cohesive potpourri of digital and analog subversion is pressed between the covers of monochrom. Each issue is an unnostalgic amalgam of 125 years of Western counterculture cocked, aimed and ready to fire at the present. It is a Sears catalog of subjective and objective irreconcilability –­ the Godzilla version of the conventional coffee table book. Published in English language, the lingua franca of late capitalism. The phatzine monochrom #26-34 (Goat of 1k Young) is an impossibility in an impossible universe — an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. 500 pages (60 ounces) of outrageous printed bestiality. And we plan to thoughtfully present it in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.”

monochrom #26-34 Ye Olde Self-Referentiality (Thanks, Johannes!)

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