Cambridge Industrial Design

A product developed by Cambridge Industrial Design for leading lighting company Osram is in the spotlight after winning a major international design prize.

The Osram Kreios G1, a new LED image projector for spotlighting and spot messaging, was selected as one of 62 ‘Best of the Best’ products in the Red Dot Design Award of 2012. Cambridge Industrial Design provided full design support to Osram in developing the product, which is used for illuminated advertising and brand promotion in settings such as trade shows and retail centres.

The German-run Red Dot Design Award is one of the world’s largest and most respected design competitions. Osram was one of 1,800 companies and designers from 58 countries that submitted a total of 4,515 products for consideration in the 2012 awards. Products are assessed, by a jury of world-renowned design experts, on innovation, functionality, ease-of-use and environmental impact.

Compact, lightweight and silent in use, the Kreios G1 is a major advance on existing LED projectors. Its high-powered, long-life LED light source and dedicated optical system allows gobos – templates carrying company logos or other messages or images – to be projected in crisp, high definition onto any surface.

Up until now, projectors have been heavy, hot, noisy and hard to position without tools. The compact, light design of the Kreios G1 makes it easy to mount on walls, ceilings and floors. It’s highly adjustable by hand, too: the projector has a tilting angle of 120 degrees and can pivot around almost its complete axis. And, despite delivering a dazzling 800 lumens of light, its low heat output allows passive cooling without any moving parts, so that it can run silently and reliably.

The product also features a faster, more user-friendly way of substituting images, as Alex Jones, owner of Cambridge Industrial Design, explains: ‘With Osram’s engineers in Germany and the USA, we came up with the innovative way that the gobos are held in place in the projector – using magnets. Gobos are simply and swiftly replaced and the angle of the projector easily adjusted by hand.

‘We’re delighted that the Kreios G1 has won such a prestigious design award. It was a great team effort with Osram and its suppliers, especially as timescales were short, with just two months from concept to first prototypes and another three months to first production samples. A Red Dot Award is a big achievement for us and shows that manufacturers don’t need large consultancies to create award winning products.’

OSRAM will present the Kreios G1 at Prolight+Sound (21 March to 24 March 2012 in Frankfurt). The booth is located in Hall 9.0, Stand D10.

Red Dot awards – http://en.red-dot.org/1402.html

Prototype support from Solve3D – http://www.solve3d.com

Osram – http://www.osram.com/osram_com/press/_trade_press/2012/kreios-g1

Design Icons: Cambridge Innovation Festival is a celebration of Cambridge design talent taking place throughout February 2012, packing in a high profile exhibition and stacks of design-related events. Download Design Icons: Exhibition Launch Party & Design 4: Event Series.  Each week there is a network event with talks:

1st Feb – Design 4: Enterprise & Start-Ups  Do you have the right people to grow your enterprise?

8th Feb – Design 4: Success  Good design is good for business, as famously said by IBM’s Thomas Watson, 1956

15th Feb – Design 4: Manufacture Embracing design, innovation and technology for efficient product management

Also …  Join us at the launch party to recognise a collection of important products designed in Cambridgeshire over the last 40 years.  Date: 9th February 2012, Time: 6-9pm  Venue:  Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University  Would be great to see as many people as possible!

The Cambridge Design Icons’ website now up! – http://www.camdesignicons.co.uk  Some great products up already – including some of ours

A selection of these products will form part of an exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery in February 2012.  Follow the conversation on Twitter #camdesignicons

If you want to vote for us the follow these links:

The robot that helped discover the human genome
Cool Hi-Fi
Ground breaking camera equipment
Award winning ultra compact PA system
A clever cat flap
LED spot light

Cambridgeshire is getting an Industrial Design networking group.

Design Council and Creative Front are supporting events next February to highlight great design produced in Cambridge from the last 40 years.  In response to this a networking group has been formed to help promote the work of Industrial Designers in this region. Open to all involved in Industrial design and related disciplines (consultants, in-house or students) they are looking for new members to help get things going along with any suggestions for talks / events.

Creative Front Cambridgeshire in partnership with the Design Council are holding a series of events next February to promote Industrial Design in Cambridgeshire. Cambridge Industrial Design along with many of the regions designers are helping to organise the festival. If you are an Industrial Designer based in Cambridgeshire then get involved!

For more information on this project, please visit http://www.creativefront.org

Exhibition Submissions -

1. The designer should be based in Cambridgeshire but the client does not need to be
2. Open to consultants and in-house teams
3. You can nominate your own or others work
4. There is no limit on you suggesting others work
5. Products must be designed in Cambridge over the last 40 years
6. We require a jpeg or photograph and a brief description of the product highlighting why you think it deserves to be included.
Please provide us with as much information as possible; product success, benefits design brought to the product in terms of market, sales, cost savings
7. Ideally you would also have a physical example of the product available to display at the exhibition
8. We would like to showcase the design process as much as possible and may require sketches and models to illustrate the product if successfully chosen
9. You must have permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the photograph in the exhibition catalogue
10. Designs must be submitted by 11 November 2011

Cambridge Industrial Design recently completed work on a motion capture suit for start-up company Media Interakt. The MotivePro is a body movement sensor system comprising a chest mounted control hub along with sixteen sensor nodes attached to the body using neoprene straps.

Designing the motion sensors proved to be demanding – the Node had to be light and have minimal effect on body movement.  The main challenge was how to mount the sensors on the body and make them stay there.  Custom neoprene straps were designed which held the Nodes in place, close to each joint of the body.  Each Node also has a sucker cup to help maintain placement.  We worked with Cambridge based Skalene Technologies who had the task of squeezing all the electronics, including a Wi-Fi module, into a very small space!

The system is intended for a whole host of uses from music production and dance to sports medicine and maybe even computer games. The cost of film grade motion capture suits put this technology out of reach for most but with MotivePro analysing and using body motion data becomes affordable.  The first two systems are currently undergoing trials.  We look forward to seeing the suit used in all sorts of industries and environments.

Oh, and we also designed the logo and some cool T-Shirts for them!

Happy Christmas all and merry product designing  for 2011.

So last year it was a Festive Robot – this year a Flying Christmas Tree!  A bit more straight forward than the robot (Sorry to those that wanted a Stealth Plane tree?!?) Download your print-and-fold tree here – Flying Christmas Tree

Good luck with those record breaking distances…

We get a lot of portfolios every year and thought (particularly as times are tough for the graduate industrial designer) it might be useful to list what we look for in a portfolio and CV.  This is just our opinion – always try to get direct feedback from other industrial designers out there.  As with any design project be prepared to re-think your approach when it comes to the portfolio.

CV
•    90% of CVs we get are just not well thought out and usually have the most relevant stuff on the last page!! Like any good bit of interface design it needs to get the relevant info across quickly and effectively.

•    Work experience (especially in a design related capacity) should be FIRST.

•    Find out the name of the person you are writing to: We usually bin those addressed ‘Dear Sir/ Madam’ even if they are wonderful. It shows an obvious lack of interest in the company. Do your research.

•    If you don’t want to send out a portfolio ensure the web link to your online portfolio is at the top of the CV and obvious.

PDF OR ONLINE PORTFOLIO

•    Small portfolio – 3 or 4 projects (maybe 2 pages per project). You need something left to show at the interview!

•    A project that is original (not a standard project from your course) always goes down well.

•    Show the thinking behind the design – not just a CAD or marker rendering. eg. exploded views card models and rough sketches. Anything that clearly shows the way the product works is great.

•    Show some understanding of production processes and materials. A big plus in our view.  Ring up a local supplier to get some advice and include that in your presentation.

•    Clean layout – minimal backgrounds please, please, please. It makes our eyes hurt otherwise.

•    Put your best work FIRST! (or we may get bored…)

What sort of experience should you be going for?  Getting manufacturing experience is very important and is something that design consultancies do not always provide.  It doesn’t matter what they make but will give you first hand experience of manufacturing and how to design for production.  Work experience of this sort will always get you noticed (over and above any cool cad renderings).  Check out the local business parks or the trade shows to find suitable manufacturing companies.   A excellent book on the subject is ‘Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals’ by Rob Thompson.

While we are not looking for anyone at the moment we hope this quick list helps in your search.

PS think about starting up a really great design blog – it can be a good way to get noticed…  check out Jared Thompson’s Design Juices

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Check out my interview here with Martin Gibson over at Embody3D.  Some great questions Martin!  Not only do Embody3D have some great interviews with other designers but they have some excellent tutorials and reviews.

While on the subject of great design websites…. we have put together a list of useful design websites and blogs (let us know if we have missed anyone)  CID reading list