Bright ideas honoured in the 2017 Good Design Awards
"From little things big things grow," goes the famous Australian song. The same, it seems, can happen in the design world, where the humble idea of using a card game to teach kids writing skills is about to be deployed in as many as 2000 schools across New Zealand.
Game of Awesome, by Wellington-based digital design agency Chrometoaster, has won this year's coveted Good Design of the Year prize at the 2017 Good Design Awards. Chrometoaster shares this year's prize with Brisbane-based design consultancy Aurecon, for its flood-resistant ferry terminal system devised after a devastating 2011 flood wrought havoc in the Queensland capital.
For the design team at Chrometoaster, the problem was seeing young boys falling behind in the critical school years of five to eight. The three top designers, all fathers, were personally invested.
"From the start we wanted to make a game that facilitates the creative writing process, but does so in a way that had a bit of toilet humour, and really involved these kids in the process," Robert Whitaker, content design director at Chrometoaster, told Fairfax Media.
The project was completed in six weeks, including the physical production of the game.
"It was a massive effort," Mr Whitaker said, "Editorial cartoonist Gavin Mouldey had to come up with 200 cards in three weeks, each with an individual illustration."
Mr Whitaker admitted that several jokes within the game were at the expense of Australian-New Zealander rivalry: "If we were going to do an Australian version of the game, we would probably need to reverse the Australia-Kiwi gags."
For the designers at Aurecon, witnessing the 2011 Brisbane floods spurred on an unconventional collaboration between the maritime, industrial, mechanical and architectural disciplines.
Game of Awesome, designed by three fathers, aims to help children, particularly boys, with their creative writing.
Photo: SuppliedThat collaboration led to a world-first ferry terminal calibrated so that during a flood the gangway floats, automatically detaches and swings away from the pontoon.
"The key part of the solution is that the gangway has a flotation chamber underneath that develops buoyancy as the water rises. As you get to a certain water level … it releases at the end and the gangway swings around," said Aurecon project director Arne Nilsen.
Flood damage in Brisbane in 2011 led to Aurecon's design of a ferry terminal gangway with a flotation chamber that develops buoyancy as water rises.
Photo: Christopher Frederick Jones"Engineers today face multiple, increasingly complex challenges, including designing for increasingly volatile and severe weather patterns associated with climate change," he said.
The awards, launched in 1958, also celebrate a Young Designer of the Year. This year, that designer is Sydney local Lilian Hambling, 23, whose "e-motion" textile clothing line utilises wearable technology to help men express emotions.
Aurecon's world-first ferry terminal gangway automatically detaches and swings away from the pontoon during a flood.
Photo: Christopher Frederick Jones"E-motion investigates the use of wearable technology to create a new form of non-verbal communication for males by measuring physiological data from the body and expressing it as dynamic light displays," Ms Hambling told Fairfax Media.
"I embedded the LEDs into the specific area of each garment that corresponds with where different emotions are typically felt within the body, for example, I positioned rows of lights into the chest because that is where many males experience love or fear."
Ms Hambling hopes that wearable technology will be a future form of communication.
"The prototypes could be used by anyone who struggles with emotional expression and communication, such as people with autism or disabilities that limit speech and gestures," she said.
Game of Awesome can be freely downloaded under the Creative Commons licence.
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