Tag Archive for 'australian design award'

Décor wine coolers – 1980s Australian product design pt3

Published by Angelique Hutchison 7 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My earlier posts about 1980s Australian product design highlighted some serious and important Australian designs from that decade. Now for something different – something that represents the good times and the rise of a food and wine culture in Australia in the 1980s – the Décor wine coolers.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum. Graphic design by Andy Schmid.

The Décor BYO wine carrier was designed in 1978, but was the beginning of a range of products developed by Décor in the 1980s. It was very different from any other product on the market. It holds two bottles of wine or four drink cans, and the removable chiller can be frozen before being placed between the bottles to keep them cool.

The inspiration for the carrier came in 1978 when Décor founder Brian Davis attended an Australian Design Awards presentation, saw a canvas or hessian wine carry bag win an award and decided that his company could make a better one. The Australian practice of ‘BYO‘ began in the 1960s and dining out and wine consumption became popular in Australia from the 1970s. Prior to this plastic bags filled with ice cubes had been used to carry wine to restaurants. Sounds very messy!

Richard Carlson was employed to design the wine carrier and quickly developed the final design. The wine cooler had widespread success and was winner of an Australian Design Award in 1979 and the 1980 Prince Philip Prize for Australian Design. In 1980 the wine carrier was being manufactured under licence in USA, Sweden and West Germany and continues to sell more than 30 years later.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Décor decided in 1984 to take the same approach with a different product, the wine cask cooler. The idea for this new product sprang from the changing preferences of Australian drinkers – cask wine was becoming more popular and Décor decided to meet the needs of this new trend.

Again designed by Richard Carlson, over a period of two years, it holds the bag of wine from any four litre cask carton. The design presented many challenges for Carlson. He said, ‘fitting the cask bag into a box was like fitting a dozen pillows into the boot of a car’. However his ability to think in terms of mass, volume and space allowed him to translate an awkward situation into an elegant, useful solution which won an Australian Design Award in 1986. The cooler features a wedge shaped chiller bottle for the wine bag to sit on, this makes it easy to get all the wine from the bag.

This product indicates the popularity of wine sold by the cask, first introduced in the 1960s by Angoves Wines. Usually the cheapest wine available, the bag reduces the air contact with wine so once it is opened it lasts longer than wine in a bottle. In 2009 around 40% by volume of the wine sold in Australia was cask wine. Although now the cask is called a ‘soft pack’ and is often a smaller two litre bag containing the same wine as is sold by the bottle.

Along with the wine cask cooler Décor developed a new wine carrier, ice buckets and picnic hampers as a complete range of products. The company won more than 250 Australian Design Awards over the 1980s alone. In 1984 Richard Carlson was awarded the Design Institute of Australia Gold Medal Award for Industrial Design and Andy Schmid, graphic designer, was awarded a Design Institute of Australia National Award for graphic design. Décor founder Brian Davis, along with designers Richard Carlson and Tony Wolfenden were inducted into the Design Institute of Australia Hall of Fame in 1996.

Pedestrian button – 1980s Australian product design pt2

Published by Angelique Hutchison 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

 

Powerhouse Museum photography. © all rights reserved

The next instalment of my favourite Australian designed products from the 1980s continues on with the transport theme. 

The pedestrian button, found at a pedestrian crossing near you, was designed in 1984. But it is really the product of research and development done in the 1970s in response to public pressure on government.

In 1967 a member of the public asked the NSW Department of Main Roads (DMR), now the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), to introduce pedestrian traffic signals he could hear. At a city crossing, the RTA installed some bells and buzzers on both sides. Blind pedestrians were meant to cross when the buzzing sound replaced the ringing. Unfortunately they found that when the bells broke down they sounded like buzzers, which could cause deadly confusion in blind pedestrians.

The next version, installed in 1976, had a two-rhythm buzzer and included a vibrating panel to touch, because many vision-impaired people also have some loss of hearing. This new device was developed by acoustic and vibration engineers Louis A Challis and Associates. It had two different signals for ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’, and the sound level was automatically lowered in response to background noise, reducing annoyance to people living near a crossing.

In the early 1980s Sydney consultants Nielsen Design Associates were asked to redesign the device to make it vandal-resistant. The new unit was made from cast aluminium with vandal-proof fixings. The large magnetic button (tested to withstand millions of pushes) is easy to find and push. A Braille arrow on the vibrating plate indicates the direction to cross. Listen to the different ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’ sounds here.

More than 25 years later, the pedestrian button is still working well, and has been used in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, South Africa and the USA.

Baby capsule – 1980s Australian product design pt1

Published by Angelique Hutchison 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

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Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Visiting The 80s Are Back exhibition I wondered: if I had to pick the best in Australian product design from the 1980s, what would it be? A Sunbeam kettle or the décor wine cask cooler? The Stackhat or a Caroma toilet? Perhaps a mop bucket or an early ResMed CPAP machine? The 1980s was a productive decade for Australian industrial designers, and the Museum holds many examples of Australian products from the era. So I’ve decided to bring out a series of my favourite Australian-designed products from the 1980s.

Beginning with an innovation that has without doubt saved many lives – the baby safety capsule. Developed 26 years ago, this product is still one of the safest child restraints on the market. In Australia, babies up to six months of age must use rear facing restraints and new child restraint laws introduced this month recommend that children face the rear of the car until age four. All child restraints sold in Australia must meet strict standards, considered to be some of the most stringent in the world.

Of course safety standards haven’t always been this strict. Wearing car seat belts has only been compulsory in Australia since the 1970s and this is when restraints for children began to come onto the market. Babies were either held in arms or travelled in a traditional bassinet that lay across the back seat, secured by the seatbelt with a protective net over the top. There was no really secure way to protect babies in a smash until the baby capsule was developed in 1984.

Rainsfords (later called Britax Childcare), the makers of the Safe-n-Sound child seat restraint, came up with the idea of the capsule. It consists of a bassinet inside a base that can be secured by a seat belt. A release mechanism allows the bassinet to rotate in a crash, keeping the baby more upright and distributing forces uniformly over its body; at the same time, the bassinet pushes against an impact-absorbing bubble in the base. The capsule was designed to fit in an adult seat space. The bassinet can be removed from the base to carry the baby around outside the car.

The capsule was designed by PA Design (later known as Invetech) with Rainsfords Safe-n-Sound and took five years of research and development. It won an Australian Design Award and Design Council Selection in 1985 and the Prince Philip Prize for Australian Design in 1986. The design was improved by the introduction of a harness in 1991 to replace the Velcro body band on the capsule in our collection.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of 1980s Australian-designed products. In the meantime I’d be interested to know – what is your favourite Australian-designed product of the 1980s?