Sandboxer Marin Licina recently won the Philips’ Domestic Appliance Competition design challenge by delivering a brilliant project showing how to value experience over technology by trying to solve people’s problems.

The simple rationale behind the competition is to push the boundaries of integrated product design by combining Philips’ technological know-how with the creativity of 200 young minds. Marin Licina and his team created a revolutionary design for Philips’ recently launched AirFryer, a device that fries food using hot air instead of oil.

Marin’s concept, based on interviews with mothers regularly cooking at home, sought to take into consideration the two main psychological factors behind the preparation of food: to feel like a great cook and to ‘feed love’ to one’s family. His goal was to use the next-gen Air Fryer to enable zen-moments: a detachable light-emitting knob ‘breathes’ when the device is operating. Remotely connected to the pan, it can be taken away, allowing to relax for a while until the device vibrates, telling you that the food is ready.

The device is controlled by a portable control knob

In order to improve flexibility and add a touch of nostalgic old-school cooking, Marin’s design is an abstract fusion of a Le Creuset casserole pan and a Multi-mixer with different attachments: all the technology is hidden in the lid. This way, many types of bowls can be placed in order to make many types of foods: fried, but also sauce-based foods, pizzas, grilled food, cooking pastas and more. The food can be served directly from the bowl, reducing the cleaning efforts.

Commenting on Marin’s winning design, Alcides Marques, senior Design Manager at Philips, said: “There’s two things I thought when I saw Marin’s movie. First: Wow. I want to buy this. Second: Damn, I wish I had designed this.” After all, people want meaningful experiences, not blunt technology.

Wladimir Nikoluk is a Sandbox Community Manager. After 6 weeks in Zurich, he is still constantly inspired by the energy and creativity of the Sandbox community.

Sandboxer Archie Lee Coates IV is involved with an amazing project, and we want to get the word out! + Pool is an initiative by a group of architects and designers to build a floating pool in the rivers of New York City.

A swimming pool like no other, it is for everyone to use. The design has been inspired by a city intersection, to exemplify the dense, busy character of New York City as well as provide a welcome island retreat from the hustle and bustle.

Moreover, it is four pools in one: child’s pool, sports pool, lap pool and lounge pool. Each pool can be used independently to cater to all types of swimmers, combined to form an Olympic-length lap pool, or opened completely into a 9,000 square foot pool for play.

Still, the most remarkable aspect has to be the pool’s water cleansing mechanism. Like a giant strainer dropped into the river, + Pool will filter bacteria, pollutants and odors through layers of water-cleansing materials integrated directly into the pool walls, leaving only safe and swimmable water that meets all EPA quality standards.

Now that the conceptual design has been completed, + Pool is looking to create a team of interested organizations and professionals to continue the development of the project through a build-able proposal.

If you think that you can facilitate the next step of this project to raise public and private interest through connections with the municipality, engineers, planners and other specialists, or if you are one, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Archie.

+ Pool has the potential to become an iconic piece of infrastructure, and an exciting precedent for environmental urbanism in the 21st century.

Sandboxer Sebastian Lindstrom, chairman of an NGO called Light for Children-Ghana and co-founder of a movement – the famous What Took You So Long Foundation – is currently crossing Africa as the locals do together with other young travelers, in search of people who are making a difference to young people in need. Witness their journey here.

The What Took You So Long Foundation is a movement to pool skills, experiences and knowledge to aid grass-roots NGOs.

Check out this great video about a part of their journey: Iron Ore Train – What Took You So Long Foundation in Africa

Sebastian is originally from Sweden. He just finished his bachelor in International Studies and minor in African Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Previously Sebastian has been studying at Korea University, Korea, and James Cook University, Singapore and Dalian University, China. Besides driving through Africa, he is also involved in the Dot2dot Summit – A forum that strives to connect and inspire the young generation of leaders for supporting one another in moving the generation in action.

You can find him on facebook and follow him on twitter.

Sebastian, good luck for the rest of the journey!

Johanna is currently interning with Sandbox, she assists the team in various areas and is focusing on community management. She just finished reading the book The Accidental by Ali Smith and can highly recommend it! You can find her on facebook here.

Inspirations we came across this week

10 Things Most MBA Schools Won’t Teach You About Startups

The Tetuan Valley Manifesto, founded by Sandboxer Alex Barrera in Spain to unite extraordinary young individuals to make a change (something we can relate to a lot, great stuff!)

Introvert to Extrovert : 4 Ways to Take Control of Your Shyness.

Healthy, Wealthy, and DEAD?: 5 Reasons Why Getting Up Early Might be Harmful, sleep plays an important role in my life, I love it, but at the same time it takes me away from creating cool things (like Sandbox…). I’ve been trying to make it to the office earlier (not very successful so far…), but maybe I should enjoy those few more minutes in bed, what do you think?

Mind Frenzy.com, I was inspired by Jared O’Toole blog and hope to gain him and his co-founder Matt Wilson as members for Sandbox soon They’re doing a cool venture in the US Under 30 CEO “Leading Gen Y to stop doing shit they hate!” Keep doing the great work and let’s talk soon how we can work together!

7 habits of highly successful GenY entrepreneurs, provided by “Generation Y Startup” in the US. Would love to talk to you guys!

Exciting marketing approach, The CMO of BestBuy asking their community to develop a job description

Chewing Gum Sculptures

Thinking Space, nice campaign from the Economist to show the work and think spaces of some very inspiring individuals.

TEDGlobal 2009 Our Advisory Board member Bruno Guissani is hosting the next TEDGlobal event coming up in Oxford and just released the final program. The title: The Substance of Things Not Seen. We should organize TED junior with all the Sandboxers, that could rock, no?!

Michael Jackson Tribute – Stockholm. July 8, 2009, Amazing flashmob

Eternal moonwalk, a global tribute to the genius of Michael Jackson

People we started following on Twitter:

Jared O’Toole

Matt Wilson

Hansueli Märki our advisory board member. We don’t know about any global top executives who are so up to date with new technologies as Hansueli. But as former IBM Chairman he is used to see technology changing all the time.

is this helpful / valuable? let us know and be inspired!

The topics were wide-spread, as it were the people. Fraser Doherty, Global Student Entrepreneur 2007, gave interesting insights into “storytelling”, a topic which was curiously debated by both practitioners and academics due to its efficacy in communicating ideas and sales-pitches. A big and promising story is the project of our friend Taz Rajwani, One Young World, which is one of the most ambitious endeavours worldwide at the moment, and Sandbox is happy to support him and his team.

Susan Kish, Director of the European Energy Forum and former VP at Xing, shared her broad experience, both related to networks and the management of knowledge. The exciting discussion whether companies are still (mis-) treating knowledge as an asset rather than an “embedded practice” which needs to be fostered, will certainly be continued at the next dinner.

Social media, of course, has been a furiously debated topic, and indeed among our members we had talents who are experts in this field: Niamh Hughes co-founded Aperitweats in London, which gathers Twitter-users around food and drinks. Innovation consultants such as Simon Rohrbach gave their fascinating insights into how to foster innovation in new media, complemented by creative insights from our fellow Sandboxer and design-talent Sagarika Sundaram.

Talents from UBS, McKinsey, Societe Generale, and other major corporates shared their intrapreneurial spirit, bringing in interesting ideas on how to modernize their conglomerates from within, one of the many opportunities arising from the crisis. They were complemented by student representatives like Vikas Chawla and Paul Gleger, who shared their experiences about managing the successful international competitions EPIC and Pitch!it.

Finally, we want to congratulate Raj again, who told us about the amazing prospects of the recently launched enternships.com project, which has already been featured in the Telegraph and been used by major start-ups around the globe.

It was an amazing evening with exciting people around good food, and we were happy to see that we could not only foster ideas, but also two cooperations between promising entrepreneurs could be initiated, as well as an academia-practice collaboration.

source: http://io9.com

There is a lot of research done on energy saving, but it leaves a wide field open to innovators, imagining revolutionary appliances for old and new technologies. When I heard about this floor transforming movement into energy, I tried to imagine other places or things that we use, where energy is lost, that could be collected instead. What about a computer that would re-load it’s battery when typing on the keyboard?

An average person types between 30-50 words per minute. Considering that the average word is 4 to 6 letters long – say 5, typing on a computer equals pushing down a button 150 to 250 times per minute. Wouldn’t that produce enough energy to power a notebook, or at least increase its battery life? Plus it would have a wonderful effect on our productivity: imagine you’re 5 hours in the plane without a power plug. Should you rather watch a 2 hour movie, or frenetically type this report you should have done weeks ago, which would keep your battery going for the whole journey?

What are some other ways we can apply this technology?
What could be other ways to easily save energy in our daily life?

This article has been cross-posted on the IncuTANK blog.

I’ve decided to re-publish all those inputs from the comments in this post, to make sure that everybody can read them – and in the hope of receiving more feedback

So, here we go: Antoine, who had just come back from London, told me about the healthy fast food joint that has iPods on the table, so you can listen to music while gulping down your veggie sandwich. Damian, who is obviously also a big Finland fan, likes the reservation system in Finnish trains which makes sure you always have a seat. And Andi, who has been travelling quite a lot recently, pointed out the iPod cafés in Cambodia, the cell-phone rental services in Peru and the very cool Brunch Club in Hong Kong (which I really, really want to have here at home!). Thanks a lot for commenting, guys!

And what are the things you’ve seen abroad that you would like to have at home?

That’s why we’ve decided to start a new series on this blog documenting the small innovations we encountered when traveling. We’re calling it “Why don’t we have that at home?”, because this is exactly what we think every time we see something really cool abroad.

I just returned from a trip to Finland (Elina, Maija, Riku and Kirill, if you’re reading this: Thanks a lot for everything!), so we’ll start with two things I’ve found in this beautiful nordic country:

1. Supermarket salad that’s actually fresh. I don’t like salad from the supermarket; it usually looks old and doesn’t taste like much. At home, I make the effort to go to a real market to buy salad. But the Finnish supermarkets showed me that there is another way: They sell their salad with the roots still in a tiny bucket of earth. Very simple, not expensive (the salad was one euro apiece), but works very well: I’ve never had salad from a supermarket that looked and tasted that good.

2. Mobile phone booths in the train. In every Finnish train coach, there is a small mobile phone booth. The mobile phone-crazy Finns use it to make calls because reception in the booth is better than elsewhere in the train. The great side effect is that fellow travelers don’t get disturbed by all the phone chatter.

Now over to you: What are the cool innovations you’ve encountered while traveling the world?