Help! I've Cut Myself and I Want to Save a Life kits, which can be bought over the counter, contain plasters and bandages for covering small cuts, as well as cotton swabs. A small amount of blood from a cut can be caught on a swab and posted to a marrow donor registry in a pre-paid envelope, which also comes in the simple green and white package.

Graham Douglas, a member of creative agency Droga5, came up with the idea after his twin brother was diagnosed with Leukaemia and an unknown bone marrow donor saved his life.

"Unfortunately, the marrow donor registry is one of the most underrepresented donor programs in the world," says Douglas. "It's no wonder really - most people think registering as a marrow donor is painful and complicated, when really all it takes is a couple of drops of blood."

Douglas' idea aims to catch potential donors when they are already bleeding, and give them all the necessary components to send their sample to a donor registry easily.

He set up the scheme with pharmaceutical company Help Remedies and international marrow donor registry DKMS, and registrants have tripled as a result.

Help Remedies create colour-coded medicine packets named after symptoms rather than ingredients, for example paracetamol labelled Help! I've Got a Headache.

The annual D&AD Awards honour exemplary design and advertising projects. One White Pencil is awarded each year to reward creativity for social good.

Other winning projects at this year's D&AD Awards, which took place earlier this week, include Thomas Heatherwick's Olympic Cauldron, BarberOsgerby's Olympic Torch and the new UK Government website.

Last year, Apple was named best design studio of the pasty fifty years at a special ceremony commemoration the awards' 5oth anniversary, while D&AD president Neville Brody described plans to remove creative subjects from the school curriculum in the UK as "insanity".

More medical design we've featured includes Christmas stockings filled with blood for donation and a range of pill containers by Yves Behar.

See more design for health »
See more stories about D&AD »

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for Help Remedies and DKMS appeared first on Dezeen.

"Berlin is a never-finished city. The living cost is not so high here, which means the people have time to think and time to make experiments," says Suermann. "This is quite a comfortable situation for the designers."

"But we have also problems," he continues. "We have not so much industry in Berlin, we have not so many companies that need design. But we have a lot of creative people and so the competition is really hard here."

Suermann moved to the city in 1993, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city for nearly 30 years. Ten year's later, in 2003, he founded DMY International Design Festival Berlin.

He says the lifestyle of Berliners has only recently started to change. "I think now, after 20 years [living in Berlin], it's changed a bit. Now the money is also coming to Berlin, we can feel it. The rent is going much more expensive. But it has also a positive side: for the designers they get more contracts here, they have more work."

However, there are still many areas of the city where the cost of living is still low compared to other cities, Suermann says. One such example is Kreuzberg, the central Berlin neighbourhood where he lives and works, which was formerly bordered by the Berlin Wall. "Nobody wanted to live in Kreuzberg, so a lot of foreigners moved here because the rent was really, really cheap," he says.

"Now a lot of creative people also come into this area [and] the mix is really interesting. It's quite lazy - it's really nice that you can have this easy neighbourhood so near to the centre [of the city]."

"We have a lot of galleries here, studios, clubs, bars, cafes," Suermann continues, pointing out SO36, one of the first German punk clubs to emerge in the 1970s, as well as Burgermeister, a burger restaurant located under a railway bridge in a former public toilet.

"You can start on Friday evening with your party and then continue until Monday morning," he says. "For Berlin it's typical; there are a lot of people going out after breakfast."

But Suermann sounds a note of caution to those young designers expecting an easy ride once they arrive in the city. "A lot of young people come to Berlin and they think, 'okay, I'm now in the hotspot and I [will] get successful here.''' he says. "But after a while they find out it's a really hard fight here."

"If you don't go outside [of Berlin] you will [get] stuck here. You can have a nice life here, but you have a low income and you're stuck. And then it's really complicated to come out of this situation."

"Most of the successful designers have their studios here, they live here, but they're working with companies outside from Berlin. I think that's really important."

We'll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Berlin over the coming days.

We drove around Berlin in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Reso Dream by Simplex. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

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to get stuck in Berlin" appeared first on Dezeen.

The MINI Paceman Garage hosted a week-long series of workshops in which students were tasked with coming up with a new product or identity for MINI and pitching it to the car brand.

"The MINI community spreads into the design community, and that's why we do these workshops with young students," Warming says. "Sometimes one very straight thought, especially from a younger generation, actually helps nail things and makes them very simple and honest."

Warming led the first workshop himself. "It's not just a one-way street, where I might be teaching about how to do design," he says. "It's my view on design and what [the students] spontaneously think of that."

The guest in our Dezeen and MINI World Tour Studio is Justin McGuirk, architecture and design journalist and director of Strelka Press. "The most interesting thing I've seen is the OMA furniture for Knoll," he says of this year's fair.

But McGuirk doesn't believe the Tools for Life collection, which includes a motorised table and chair that rise and fall at the press of large red buttons, are meant to be practical pieces of furniture.

"If you look at the way that Knoll is presenting this furniture it's the standard spiel about adaptable, ergonomic furniture," he says. "But it's got nothing to do with that. The whole thing is just a performance and I think it is deeply nostalgic for industry."

"It's an interesting time to launch a product like that," he continues. "Here we are in Milan where the city's industry and the country's industry is visibly in decline - it's almost this message that industry is dead, so now we can turn it into luxury. But also, it turns industry into a fetish."

Another piece in the Tools for Life collection is a counter made of three swivelling stacked blocks. McGuirk says: "It's one of those classic designs that purports to solve all of these different problems, but actually solves none of them. So it's actually completely useless."

"It comes clearly from an architecture studio, and one that's not overly concerned with form as well."

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

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"turns industry into a fetish" appeared first on Dezeen.

Chris Kelly developed the concept for his graduation project at the University of Greenwich, exploring how flaws in human perception can cause contradictions with reality and how virtual environments can be used to reveal more about a person's surroundings.

"Our understanding of space is not always a direct function of the sensory input but a perceptual undertaking in the brain where we are constantly making subconscious judgements that accept or reject possibilities supplied to us from our sensory receptors," he says. "This process can lead to illusions or manipulations of space that the brain perceives to be reality."

The idea is based around the science that the senses gather various streams of data every second, which are then selected or rejected by the human brain. Kelly proposes a digital device that could compile all of these pieces of information and relay them back to the individual within the limits of their physical space.

"The redirection techniques and the use of overlapping architecture allow the same physical space to hold a much larger virtual space," he told Dezeen.

Referencing existing virtual reality technologies such as bionic contact lenses and the voice-controlled Google Glass headset, Kelly explains that the technology could be used in endless scenarios.

"One of the more obvious uses is in the gaming industry. Another possible use is in the architectural design process, where rather than creating fly throughs or models that can be viewed on a screen it would be possible to actually move through a virtual mock up of a design or even work from inside a virtual model whilst editing it in real time," he says.

Chris Kelly completed the project for Unit 15 of the architecture diploma course at the University of Greenwich, now led by the Bartlett School of Architecture's former Vice Dean Neil Spiller. The unit is a reincarnation of the Bartlett's successful film and animation module, which boasts Kibwe Tavares' award-winning Robots of Brixton project as one of its products.

See more of this year's graduation projects, including a series of towering seaside structures and a shape-shifting ballet school.

Here's a short description from Chris Kelly:

Rubix

The project was conceived as a complementary exercise to the written architectural thesis Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: The Possibilities of Utilising Virtual[ly Impossible] Environments in Architecture that explores the way in which virtual environments could be deployed within the physical world to expand or compress space. The thesis investigated existing research in neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, which was added to with empirical primary tests, to identify gaps in our perception that lead to a contradiction between our perception and reality. It was found that when moving with natural locomotion, such as walking in a physical space our perception of distance and orientation is incredibly malleable and can be manipulated by replacing the visual sense with a virtual stimulus that differs from what we would experience in reality. This manipulation can take the form of redirection techniques, such as rotation and translation gains and overlapping architecture which result in a stretching or compressing of distances in the virtual environment we see whilst moving through a physical space. This effect creates a TARDIS space which allows vast expanses of virtual worlds to be explored within a small physical space without ever reaching the limits of that space.

The aim of the rubix project was to develop an animation that described a conceptual tool for deploying these malleable virtual environments that could be used by their creators to shift space around us. The rubix concept stemmed from the need for an algorithmic formula for controlling the use of redirection techniques; it allows for many different spatial combinations whilst a level of control is constantly maintained. In the animation the initial Escher-esque space is a representation of our perceptual system where huge amounts of information arrive in the brain from multiple streams. The process of perception involves the brain selecting and rejecting contradicting pieces of information leading to a perception of reality that only gives us glimpses into the world we are in.

The animation represents a journey through the chosen site that was explored during an earlier project which was a stretch of the Docklands Light Railway between Beckton and East India stations. The virtual journey is compressed into 5 minutes using transitional spaces that enclose the explorer whilst the environment shifts around them. The redirection techniques deployed in the film have been exaggerated in some parts to make them more identifiable but as explored in the thesis it is also possible to deploy them subtly so the shifts in the environment would not be perceived. The development of products such as Google Glass and bionic contact lenses at the University of Washington mean it is becoming increasingly possible to overlay virtual information on the physical world. In the future this information could be overlaid so subtly and convincingly that it is possible that distance and space will become increasingly malleable and cavernous virtual spaces could exist within a small physical space, with Doctor Who's TARDIS becoming a perceived reality.

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Chris Kelly appeared first on Dezeen.

Weber updated an object that has been largely unchanged for 2,000 years by adding a set of valves that enable the glassblower to influence the inner shape of the material by opening and closing different air streams.

"As I started out, the question was how could I work on the inner shaping of the glass – it was a technical approach," Weber told Dezeen. "The relation between the glassblower and his tool is very important, since it bridges his connection to the material," he adds. "What if I change the tool? Does it change the material?"

Strange Symphony was Philipp Weber's graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven and was tested by Belgian glassblower Christophe Genard, who Weber says was enthusiastic about the new possibilities it offered him.

"I guess it was the playfulness it provoked in him; in the later stage he went wild on the glass," says Weber. "It was as if I was watching a jazz performance. I think and hope he gained another and different perspective on approaching glassmaking through this project."

The DMY International Design Festival Berlin is one of the stops on our Dezeen and MINI World Tour, and we'll be publishing more stories and videos from the event in the next few days.

Last week a glass pendant with a tiny brass chandelier inside it was presented at ICFF in New York, while Norwegian designers StokkeAustad and Andreas Engesvik created a series of blown-glass trees for Stockholm Design Week earlier this year – see all stories about glass.

Here are some more details about the project:

In 'Creation of a strange Symphony' Philipp Weber portrays the performance of a glassblower using a new and unusual tool.

Pivotal to this work was Weber's desire to discover the world of a glassblower. In Belgium he was able to watch glassblower Christophe Genard working with the hot material. The designer questioned himself, 'How can I inspire his interest to work with me?'.

Genard's most important tool, the blowing pipe, caught Weber's attention. In the past 2000 years only minor alterations have been made to the 1.5m long steel pipe, with no effect to the material. 'What would happen to the glass if the function of this tool radically changed? How would Christophe adapt to a new pipe?'.

And so, by manipulating the pipe, he took influence on the inner shaping of the glass.

Simultaneously to this process, Weber also sensed a strong rhythm and musicality in the way Genard was working on the glass. The pipe as a tool for glass production, appeared to be like a musical instrument to him.

He could not resist the idea to translate the mechanism of a trumpet into an application for blowing glass.

Together with an engineer and the knowledge from preceding experiments for a new tool, he worked on an 'instrument' – an allegoric bond of craft and music – inspiring Genard to 'improvise' the glass, to start a dialogue with the material.

Playing the valves, Genard would shape the glass from inside, activating different air streams. The transformation of the pipe into an instrument provoked a performance of glass making. A short-movie, several glass objects and the instrument itself communicate this dance with the fire.

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by Philipp Weber appeared first on Dezeen.