Open up your mind and say, ahh...

We launch our first annual Innovation By Design awards, Scrabble gets a lovely makeover, and Jonah Lehrer makes it okay to daydream about unicorns. It’s our top stories of the week.

Fast Company Is Launching A Design And Innovation Competition. We Want YOU! C’mon now, don’t be shy.

6 Keys For Turning Your Company Into A Design Powerhouse. “While getting the best talent is an important goal, creating an environment where design can thrive should be the greater focus.”–Jeneanne Rae, CEO of Motiv Strategies.

Pair: A Social Networking App Just For Couples. Yes, but can it passive-aggressively do the dishes?

4 Problems Google Glasses Have To Solve Before Becoming A Hit. Dear Google: Be more like Apple. Love, us.

How Facebook Finds The Best Design Talent, And Keeps Them Happy. “Both Nicholas Felton and Mike Matas got personal invitations from the main man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg.”

3-D Printing Is So Last Year: MIT’s “Self-Assembling Sand” Builds Objects Instantly. Behold, wonder goop!

Watch These Scientists Grow Bones Using Lego Robots. “Industrial equipment is expensive, and Lego does the job for a fraction of the price.”–Researcher Michelle Oyen. Imagine the deal they’d get on Mega Bloks!

The New Strategic Edge: Tapping Your Customers’ Personal Passions. “Social impact is fast becoming a widespread, rigorous business metric.”

The World’s Sweetest Scrabble Set Is Now A Reality. At $199, it’s expensive, but boy, what a beaut.

3 Critical Insights Into Creativity From Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine.” Spend more time daydreaming? Done. Rainbows, unicorns, kitties. Rainbows, unicorns, kitties …

Suzanne LaBarre

Suzanne is a senior editor at Co.Design. You may email her at suzannelabarre@gmail.com Continued

“Texts From Hillary” is the latest Tumblr blog making waves on the political web, and for good reason — it’s downright hilarious.

The meme blog is built around two photos of a sunglasses-clad Secretary of State Clinton checking her cellphone on a military C-17 aircraft from last October. The original photos were taken by Reuters’ Kevin Lamarque and Time’s Diana Walker.

Those photos are used to portray Clinton as a rough-and-rumble, all-business Secretary of State.

“Hey Hill, whatchu doing?” asks President Obama in one example — to which Clinton cooly replies, “running the world.”

And when a worried woman texts her that it’s 3 a.m. and “something’s happening,” Clinton calms her nerves with an assertive “cool it” — a reference to this ad the Clinton presidential campaign ran against then-Senator Obama during the 2008 primary season:

Texts From Hillary was the idea of Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe, both communications professions living in the Washington, D.C. area. The pair were talking about the photos of Clinton that were spreading around the web, and they quickly turned it into a meme.

“Mind you, this all happened at the bar after a few drinks,” says Lambe. “But when you hang out with Tumblr friends — these are the kind of things you discuss.”

Lambe’s got a few influential followers on his regular blog, and they helped him take the new satirical Clinton site viral. Lambe says while they never expected it to go crazy, they’re thrilled that it did.

“Of course, I’m waiting for Hillary to text me,” he added.

The new meme suits Clinton, who has recently enjoyed coverage portraying her as an excellent choice for heading up the State Department. And, who knows, if she decides to run for president in 2016, a whole bunch of free, positive publicity certainly couldn’t hurt.

Do you love the Texts From Hillary blog? Post your ideas for Texts From Hillary memes in the comments below!

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, SEIU International

There’s work that makes you jealous, and work that inspires you, and sometimes both at the same time. This simple-yet-over-the-top corporate promo, by Swedish creative agency House of Radon, falls into that third category. The brief they got from Ericsson would make even an actuary’s eyes glaze over: “Show how a multi-purpose, multi-technology network node enables operators to meet their three priorities in relation to data traffic explosion: differentiation, control and monetization.” Radon’s solution? Go big: They designed three dozen touchscreen UI concepts to visualize Ericsson’s message and filmed them in 30 different locations in just three days. The result:

The designers here know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

This video is a great example of the changing nature of what advertising clients like Ericsson need, and how agencies like House of Radon deliver it. The big companies who make our ubiquitous digital infrastructure work, like Ericsson (or Google, or GE) aren’t peddling products so much as ideas. That gobbledegook brief that House of Radon got isn’t describing a thing that can be lit nicely and filmed, like a car; it’s outlining a (barely intelligible) concept about how Ericsson moves data around, and why it matters. House of Radon’s job isn’t to make sales out of that concept; it’s to make sense out of it. Much like the Eames Office used to do for behemoths like Westinghouse and IBM back in the mid-20th century.

And the key to “making sense,” as Charles and Ray Eames understood and House of Radon clearly does too, is in that second word: sense. As in, “appeal to the senses.” Data, nodes, operators, differentiation–all of these ideas in Ericsson’s brief are just so much insubstantial vapor. House of Radon’s video translates them into snappy factoids, which helps. But the idea of embedding them into physically appealing touchscreen interfaces–and then embedding those into a series of viscerally evocative first-person live-action scenelets, where just a hint of sound effects and out-of-focus background action instantly tells your five senses everything they need to know about what’s happening outside the edges of the frame–that’s what makes Ericsson’s brief make sense.

Data is everywhere now, and these zillion interfaces make you feel that in your bones.

This creative concept could have worked fine even if House of Radon didn’t go overboard with it. But the fact that they did makes sense, too. Data is everywhere now–and watching this video, with its zillion interfaces in a zillion different (but vividly rendered) places, makes you feel that in your very bones. Just like the Eames’s multiscreen propaganda film “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” won Nikita Kruschev over by showing America’s industrial prowess from seven viewpoints at once, House of Radon’s relentless cutting from new interface/location to new interface/location, three dozen times, is an essential part of getting the message across.

As more and more innovative companies find themselves “selling” invisible-but-essential ideas, this kind of advertising-as-sensemaking becomes more valuable than any glib “Got Milk?”-style product campaign ever could be. Does every spot need to cram in 30-odd interfaces and locations to make its point? Of course not. But the designers behind this House of Radon spot know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

Watch House of Radon’s promo for Ericsson

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

It’s an unforgettable sound. A slow scrape against the wall punctuated by a high-pitched clank. The broom didn’t stay balanced where you’d left it. Now you’ll have to pick it up and attempt to balance the broom again. It could stay put for six months. It could stay put for six seconds. No one knows.

Poh Liang Hock is in the process of building a better solution that’s already won a Red Dot award for its concept. His idea is a self-standing broom.

“My friends and I rented a house a few years ago. Like every other tenant, we had to clean our house from time to time. A broom, dustpan, and mop were all necessary tools in the process. However, amidst the cleaning process, the broom kept falling to the ground whenever I leaned it against the wall for some fresh air,” Hock tells Co.Design. “As a result, I came out with the vision of solving this problem once and for all: how could I keep the damned broom from falling down?”

His solution is decidedly simple and, in hindsight, painfully obvious. Rather than locking a broom’s pole to its bristles at the base, Hock’s broom pivots, repurposing the bottom as both a platform for the broom to stand upon and a weighted anchor to keep the broom vertical. While the precise implementation is still in development (and, we’re told, in need of considerable refinement), Hock has brainstormed a better broom that will likely need either no or very few additional components to realize. In other words, Hock’s broom has the potential to be a premium product through clever design alone.

“I just cannot believe my luck because such an idea is so simple that I believe even a normal guy would be able to devise such broom,” Hock writes. But the thing is, a normal guy clearly couldn’t. If he could, none of us would still be dropping brooms in 2012.

If you like typography and origami, this should set your heart ablaze: Typogami has letters that look like they’re made from folded paper. Still not smitten? It’s customizable and animated. Designed by Calango for After Effects CS3 and up, Typogami can be tweaked in a number of ways–by adjusting the color, fold angles, where the light falls, and the intensity of the shadow.

For those who aren’t keen on animation, the Dutch studio has also created a static version–free for download on Facebook–consisting of three styles (the frontside, backside, and shadow) that can be layered on top of one another to form the entire alphabet. Calango also provides an Adobe Illustrator file containing all the glyphs on a single canvas.

Click to zoom.

These letters don’t conform to the strict rules of origami purists, who insist that paper shouldn’t be cut, but we’re willing to overlook such formal transgressions for the love of creative type.

For how to use the typeface, click here.

H/T Visual News

Startup travel search engine Hipmunk already takes price, flight duration and number of stopovers into account when ranking flight search results. Now it’s adding your schedule to the equation.

A mobile app update going live on all of Hipmunk’s mobile platforms Thursday will make it easy to integrate your Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar or Apple iCal appointments with flight and hotel searches.

Appointments that conflict with flights will be shown as vertical bars within the app’s timeline of flight results, and the location of those appointments will be plotted alongside potential accommodations within the app’s map-based hotel search results. Users can control which of their scheduled meetings they’d like to include in either search through a menu.

The update is intended to cut down on toggling between calendars and Hipmunk when booking travel, which it does. But there seems to still be some untapped potential in the calendar integration.

It would be nice, for instance, if you could add your travel companion’s schedule to your search results. The update makes it possible to add a friend’s appointments by displaying their calendar on your calendar, but that can get complicated when you don’t both use the same email system or don’t want to swap calendar access.

And while the app does incorporate scheduled events into its search results — for instance, alerting you of potential conflicts when you select a flight — in most versions you can’t use your schedule as a search filter. The exception is the Android app, which allows users to hide all flights that conflict with their events.

“It’s not a major focus right now, but we will definitely look at how our users are engaging with the calendar feature, will listen to their feedback and continuously look for ways to improve upon the experience,” Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein tells Mashable.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, narvikk

The pie chart got its name honestly: It’s shaped like a pie and carved into pieces like slices. But where its namesake generally contains gooey sweetness, pie graphs are filled with chalky, boring data. Not anymore: The infographic team at Pop Chart Lab has whipped up the mother of all pie charts: pie charts of pies.

Click to zoom. Click to zoom.

These graphs function as one would expect: Showing the proportions of ingredients (by weight) in everything from blueberry and banana cream to sweet potato and shoofly (warning: this one’s heavy on the lard). There are 13 in all–a baker’s dozen. “The hardest part,” Pop Chart tells Co.Design, “might have been limiting ourselves to just 13 delicious pies.”

“Pie Charts” is available here dozen as a limited-edition 18”x24” print for $22.