From a gigantic glass structure to a wearable sensor that alerts when a cow is about to calve, the nominations for 2015 Design of the Year come in all shapes and sizes, but all of them are interesting in their own way.
The Design Museum in London has released a fascinating short list of 74 innovative designs and high tech products from around the globe.
The short list is split across six categories; architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport, and such is the museum's confidence in its selections that it claims, "someday the other museums will be showing this stuff."
Frank Gehry's "Fondation Louis Vuitton," a glass structure housing an art museum in France, is so complex that new machines had to be specially built to design its twisting glass walls.
Possibly even more impressive is Asif Kahn's "Megafaces," or "selfie building," which was on display at the Sochi Olympics in Russia last year. Visitors to Megafaces entered scanning booths and then had their faces re-engineered in 3D on the 26-foot-tall wall of the structure to form a so-called "Mount Rushmore for the digital age."
"Shadowing" is an interactive streetlamp installed across the city of Bristol in the U.K. which captures the shadow of a pedestrian passing under the light and then plays back the shadow alongside the next person to come along.
"Project Daniel" is the world's first 3D printing prosthetic lab set up in South Sudan to build prosthetic arms for a 14-year-old boy named Daniel who lost both his arms when a bomb exploded as he was tending to his parents' cattle. The story is outlined in the video below.
On a lighter note, Moocall is a nifty little device that slips onto a cow's tail and by using gesture recognition software notifies the farmer when it's time to start the calving process. Another "tail end" design is the Blue Diversion toilet which achieves the miracle of turning human waste into drinking water.
"It's about the best of human endeavour," said Gemma Curtain, curator of the exhibition, which opens next month. "Design is about solving problems, but it's not always going to change your life -- it can enhance life and simply give pleasure as well."
The designs will be on display at the museum in London from March 23 to Aug. 25, during which time one overall and six category winners will be selected by a panel of jurors. Category winners will be announced May 4 and the overall winner will be named June 4.
