Smithsonian.com

Everyone knows that creating a quality product requires polling your audience. So in hearing that the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has teamed up with the New York City Department of Transportation, Google and Transportation Alternatives in a competition to design a bike rack for New York City, I—an urban biker myself—have a thing or two to say.

The ideal bike rack would be a flashy piece of street furniture, like London’s telephone booths, so you could spot it on the fly. It would have a slot for each bike to avoid one falling and causing a domino effect, and it would be made of a padded (but waterproof) material so that it’s not metal on metal for shiny, new bikes.

But it’s one thing to think it. Up to ten finalists in the CityRacks Design Competition will have to execute it, building a prototype with a $5,000 stipend.

The prototypes will be previewed at Cooper-Hewitt this fall and then installed in the city for a trial period. The first place winner will take away a $5,000 cash prize and have his or her rack implemented throughout New York City. So bikers, play informant for your architect, designer or engineer friends and all you biking architects out there get busy. Registration ends April 30.

So with bike lanes painted and now parking solutions underway, I guess cyclists are left to deal with the ever-so-threatening car door.

Hunter Hoffman, director of the University of Washington’s Virtual Reality Research Center, has a new take on how to deal with pain. He’s created SnowWorld, an innovative virtual reality program that distracts burn victims during painful wound care procedures with a glacial world of snowmen waiting to be pegged with snowballs. We caught up with Hoffman—one of the 87 designers in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s Design Life Now exhibition—before his VR headset moves to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on January 26.

Why did you choose to focus on burn patients?

Wound care of burn patients is one of the most painful procedures in medicine. So if you can get something to work with those patients, chances are good that it will work for other medical procedures. Patients report re-experiencing their injuries when getting their wound care so it’s almost like getting burned again when getting bandages changed.

Why did you choose to create a snowy world for the patients?

The snow and the icy imagery is the antithesis of fire. We’re trying to help the person escape from the fire. There’s a natural evolutionarily selected behavior to get away from the thing that’s injuring you and so people want to leave the treatment room. What we do with SnowWorld is say, ‘We need your body to be here to get the wound care done, but your mind doesn’t have to be here. Your mind can escape into this snowy canyon.’

How much does SnowWorld lower pain perception?

Dave Patterson and I get around 35 to 50 percent reductions on average. Todd Richards and I did some brain scans and studied pain-related brain activity, and there we found 50 to 90 percent reductions in pain-related brain activity.

With Nintendo’s Wii being used for physical therapy and now SnowWorld, do you think that medicine will be tapping into gaming technology more and more?

The gaming industry has created a $40 billion a year incentive for companies to come up with faster and faster computers, faster and faster video cards. The ultra fast, inexpensive computers are being used like crazy in the medical community, and the gaming industry is having a big impact on the quality of medical care and the computerization of western medicine.

How did you feel getting selected for Design Life Now?

It’s easier to believe that SnowWorld is well designed than it is to believe it’s a work of art. I think this exhibit is opening up the definition of design to include medical design. I was surprised to see that, and I think it’s a great idea.

(Photograph courtesy of Hunter Hoffman, UW Seattle)

At first glance, the canvas, rubber-soled slip-on may seem too simple to win a design contest. Some even argued it had been around the block. “This shoe is a plain copy from the typical shoe from Argentina, Uruguay and the south of Brazil. I don’t see the innovation in it,” read a heated posting on Cooper-Hewitt’s online comment board during the month-long voting period.

But, hold your judgment.

The museum’s contest asked what constitutes good design, and the public answered. Less is more—and a socially conscious business model is, apparently, what counts.

Former Amazing Race contestant Blake Mycoskie founded Toms Shoes, maker of the Argentine-style shoe, in 2006, with one premise in mind: for every shoe sold, one would be given to a child in need. The self-proclaimed Chief Shoe Giver made a trip to Argentina last year, distributing 10,000 shoes, and he’s set to give out 50,000-and-counting in a South Africa shoe drop this November.

The shoe eked out a win over the Floating Pool, which docked this past summer in the Hudson River at the Brooklyn Bridge Park Beach.

Sorry, New Yorkers. I guess feet are more important than beatin’ the heat.

(Blake Mycoskie, photograph by Paige Mycoskie, courtesy of TOMS Shoes)

Today kicks off the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Week. If you want to have a say in the matter of what constitutes good design, go vote for one of the 300 submissions, or nominate one yourself, in the second annual People’s Design Award.

You’ll have your pick of environmentally conscious designs, like green roofs, and British designer Anya Hindmarch’s trend-setting “I’m not a plastic bag” canvas totes. Check out engineering and technological feats like the Grand Canyon Skywalk, and the iPhone. There are throwbacks, there too, like the first Nintendo system and the once-trendy Adidas Sambas.

Voting is open until 6 p.m. E.S.T. October 16, and the winner will be announced 10 p.m. on October 18.

Last year’s winner was the Katrina Cottage, (above) designed by architect Marianne Cusato. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Cusato innovated this permanent, affordable (even attractive) house for hurricane victims.

National Design Week is an outgrowth of Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Awards, a program that, for the last eight years, has recognized architecture, communications, fashion, interior, landscape and product designers. Back in May, Cooper-Hewitt announced its 2007 National Design Award winners, one of whom was Chip Kidd. Look for our interview with him in our November issue.

(Courtesy of Cusato Cottages)