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Check out the winners of the first-ever 2020 International Automotive Photography Awards.
+ Founded and judged by Hedi Sersoub, Amy Shore, and Drew Gibson, the awards announced the first-ever winner and finalists, with the top prize going to Ben Sager.
+ Pending the pandemic, the photographs will be featured in an exhibition in London.
Courtesy of nike.com
In other creative news, Nike releases GO FlyEase sneakers—the first hands-free shoe.
+ The idea started in 2012, when then 16-year-old Matthew Walzer, who has Cerebral Palsy, wrote to Nike outlining his disappointment that no athletic brand had created sneakers adapted for people with disabilities.
+ The sneaker was designed with a bi-stable hinge that secures the shoe in an open or closed position, making for an accessible way to kick your shoes on or off.
Courtesy of aboutamazon.com
NBBJ is designing a spiraling glass tower with an outdoor hiking trail for Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia.
+ Called The Helix, the building will also feature indoor gardens, an artist-in-residence program, and a meeting room with capacity for 1,500 people.
+ NBBJ hopes to start construction next year, though some are already ridiculing its facade, calling the building a “glass poop emoji covered in trees.”
Photo courtesy of makebreathingroom.com
Uniting art and activism, Breathing Room launches a design-focused resource for ending police brutality.
+ Launched by a Black-led creative coalition, Breathing Room is creating space for Black people to come together to tackle police reform with design- and action-based solutions.
+ “Our creative challenge was to find a way to acknowledge the current reality, which we do through the curriculum, and pair it with inspiring visuals that represent a broader definition of the Black experience. Our identity system and campaign were intentionally designed to magnify what’s on the other side of that trauma: Black joy and limitlessness,” founder Sola Biu told It’s Nice That.
Photo courtesy of iykyk.theinfatuation.com
The Infatuation releases a limited-edition zine about the art of food.
+ Called IYKYK: And If Not, Now You Do, the first issue focuses on cha chaan tengs, a type of café key to Hong Kong’s food culture.
+ “So many cuisines from across the world are marginalized in food media, relegated only to holiday specific recipes or singular pieces for the sake of diversifying content,” Emily Ng, art director at The Infatuation, said in a newsletter about the release. “Well, that ain’t enough. We deserve the whole fucking magazine.”
Photo courtesy of sepantadesign.com
Travel to the future in Chengdu, China’s first unmanned metro line.
+ Designed by J&A and Sepanta Design, the futuristic metro station interiors are based on local silk weaving and plants found in the surrounding parks.
+ The metro line, called Line 9, uses trains that communicate with each other using the 5G mobile network rather than drivers.
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Meet the furniture company giving formerly incarcerated people a second chance.
+ Formr was launched in 2020 with the goal of putting out “objects with conviction” while giving jobs to people who have been previously incarcerated.
+ The brand’s furniture runs the gamut, from clean and geometric shapes to “choreographed randomness.”
Photo courtesy of durbachblockjaggers.com
Will this be the world’s skinniest skyscraper?
+ Durbach Bock Jaggers has proposed a 6-meter-wide—nearly 20 feet—hotel for downtown Sydney. The building is being referred to as a “skyscratcher” rather than a “skyscraper” because of its improbable narrowness.
+ The 33-story building, aptly named the Pencil Tower Hotel, would house 173 rooms “designed for overlapping and intuitive use—closer to a train or plane compartment than a conventional hotel room,” architect Neil Durbach told The Sydney Morning Herald.
“We’ve been very clear as a brand that we put the human in the middle with everything,” Paul Wraith says. Photo courtesy of Ford
Ford and Google join forces to reinvent the car experience.
+ As part of their six-year partnership, the companies are looking to rework the car experience from the ground up, from vehicle design, engineering, and assembly to how customers shop.
+ The alliance will rely on Google’s Android operating system and its cloud-based computing network as a means to take automotive design further. Starting in 2023, the Android system will be implemented into all Ford and Lincoln models.
Photo courtesy of sundance.org
And this year’s Sundance winners are …
+ Across 73 feature films, humanizing stories reigned, with Grand Jury Prizes awarded to CODA (US Dramatic), Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (US Documentary), Flee (World Cinema Documentary), and Hive (World Cinema Dramatic).
+ This year’s festival looked a little different, with entries screened online. “This was not a ‘virtual’ festival, it was a real festival and the power of these artists and their work was what made it so,” said Sundance Film Festival Director Tabitha Jackson.
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