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Worrell Judges 2009 Robot Show

April 4th, 2009

Minnesota Robot Show 2009

Award Winner

Bob Worrell and Dan Darst from Worrell’s Minneapolis headquarters judged at the FIRST Robotics Minnesota Regional Competition this last weekend of April 3rd and 4th. High School students took over the University of Minnesota’s William’s arena as well as the Mariucci Arena with their robots designed with the help of corporate sponsors and high school math and science teachers.

And what fun they had as the Midwest’s most intelligent students competed in a sports tournament with their very own inventions.

Minnesota Robot Show 2009

General Motors Award for Industrial Design

For a link to the story covered on Fox9 news, click here. Robot Story on Fox
 

IDSA Midwest Opening Night Party

April 3rd, 2009

In addition to being official sponsors for the Midwest IDSA 2009 conference held in Minneapolis April 3-5th, Worrell also hosted the opening night party for the event at their Minneapolis Design headquarters. The event was a huge success with over 400 student and professional attendees.

U of St. Thomas Students Tour Worrell

April 1st, 2009

Excellent Design Tour

The answer to “What is Excellent Design?”  Jon Dixon, professor at the University of St. Thomas, takes his students every semester to Worrell to get an answer to that very question.  Bob Worrell, founder and CEO of Worrell and Emily Matejcek, Director of Marketing, toured students through their Minneapolis facility discussing just want goes into discovering and creating excellent, marketable products.

Throughout the tour, they discuss the process of how research and strategy feed into good design and how having an engineering staff on hand at the beginning of projects helps with feasibility and transfer to manufacturing.  They tour Worrell’s prototyping department where they are shown before and afters as well as the different stages and types of prototypes used in industrial design and field product research.
Excellent Design Tour
The tour ended with a discussion and presentation on the difference between engineers and industrial designers.

Mark Kennedy Meets with Worrell’s China Team

March 19th, 2009

Mark Kennedy - WorrellFormer Congressman Mark Kennedy visited Worrell design office in Shanghai China while touring China. Mark is a proponent and active promoter of global innovation, and gave a speech at the American Chamber of Commerce- Shanghai following his visit to Worrell. Mr Kennedy was exploring Worrell’s innovative practices both in China and globally during the visit.

Design Director Pete Madson and Worrell research, strategy and design staff hosted Mr. Kennedy’s visit.

Worrell Hosts IDSA Opening Night Party

March 17th, 2009

To see the official poster for the event click here.

Worrell, an official sponsor for 2009’s IDSA Midwest conference is hosting this year’s opening night party at their Minneapolis Headquarters on Friday, April 6th at 7pm.

Worrell Minneapolis Headquarters
1414 Marshall St NE
Minneapolis, MN 55414 

This year’s conference theme is “Meaning” Uncovering multiple levels of meaning in the design of objects and experiences.  The featured speakers are:

Steve Diller the author of “Making Meaning”
Bob Schwartz, General Manager of Global Design, GE Healthcare
Frederick K. W. Day President, World Bicycle Relief
Wendy Jedlička, author of Packaging Sustainability 
Bruce M. Tharp, Art Institute of Chicago 
Bernard Gonzalez, 3M
Paul Hatch, Teams Design 
Alex Lobos, University of Illinois 
Scott Robertson, author of “Concept Design”
Gary Vande Berg, Bemis Manufacturing 

Link to the event listing

Gizmodo Reviews Honeywell Touchscreen Thermostat

March 10th, 2009

Honeywell thermostatHoneywellremote
With two products, a touchscreen thermostat and a wireless portable thermostat remote, Honeywell has changed how I control my heating and cooling forever. In a good way.

The system I have here consists of those two parts: a touchscreen, full color thermostat that takes the place of your current thermostat called the Prestige, and a black and white wireless thermostat remote called thePortable Comfort Control.

The Portable Comfort Control is what’s the most revolutionary about this package. It’s about the size of two Wiimotes, it’s touchscreen and can basically take the place of the thermostat from anywhere in the house. You can set both heating and cooling temp for as many zones as your house has, as well as read the current temperature from the thermostat, the remote itself or an outside sensor.

It works perfectly. Its backlit touchscreen lights up when pressed, and is responsive enough that you can actually control it without letting a bunch of expletives fly at how lousy the screen is. It reaches every corner of my three-story house, even with multiple floors and walls and doors in the way. Basically, it lets me turn on the heat from the ground floor without having to run up two flights of stairs. Every house needs one.

The Prestige, which is the color touchscreen thermostat, works just as well. The touchscreen is bright and responsive as well as intuitive—something even simpler thermostats are not. It too can sync up with an outside sensor to display the current outside temperature, and does everything that a thermostat is supposed to do (schedule, hold, etc).

Installation was pretty easy. Ours was done by a professional Honeywell installer, but with enough knowledge Gizmodo readers should be able to do it themselves. The entire process, from hooking up the thermostat to syncing the remote to drilling in the outside sensor, took only about an hour.

Point is, the Prestige and the Portable Comfort Control are, if you consider yourself a gadget fan at all, a fantastic addition to the rest of your home tech solutions. Honeywell usually recommends that you get these installed via a contractor, but if you’re at least a little bit handy, you should be able to do it yourself. Those people who are buying a house (like our Sean Fallon) should really think about getting one of these.

From Gizmodo

Design Research Conference

March 7th, 2009

img_2431Worrell design research specialist, Ed Reilly, attended and actively participated in the recent design research conference, Exposed09.  Held at Arizona State University, the conference explored the present and future of design research with many workshops focused on exploring synthesis methods to analyze and present findings to design teams and clients.  Worrell supports multiple avenues for its employees to grow and learn new skills to benefit internal teams and client deliverables.  Having participated in several of the workshops, Ed plans to hold an internal conference at Worrell to download the additional tools he learned for our ever-expanding Research and Strategy team’s toolbox.

 

img_2432At the conferences’ Show-n-Tell Ed was able to share an interactive collaboration between himself and Worrell design researcher, Ryan Sohlden. Think Really Small: Tell a Big Story.  The website for their concept can be found at http://www.thinkreallysmall.com. Think Really Small’s website is a forum on utilizing culture cues to create more engaging personas that encourage empathy with customers and other stakeholders.

 

img_2437Another focus of the conference was on the fairly recent recognition that design and research methods can be utilized to define strategic problems and opportunities for organizational transformation. Worrell has been utilizing this practice for years through our proprietary Censys® platform to define and prioritize strategic direction for clients with the input of a cross-functional client team. With so many opportunities to pursue as an organization, Censys® can help distinguish the right path.

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