National Pro Grid League

Earth Bits is a data-driven journey to raise collective awareness around the environmental crisis, allowing visitors of maat - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon - to experience climate change from scientific evidence. Earth Bits stimulates reflection on the relationship between science, humanity, nature, and technology in a very objective way. It shows the energetic transition and the current crisis, inviting visitors to explore the intrinsic relationship between people and the planet, understanding the repercussions of our choices and the impact of our actions. As designers, we facilitate the flux and translation of data as fuel for creating knowledge, cultural value, and critical thinking. Not merely providing information or solutions, but creating a new grammar of understanding, to read the complexity of our fast-changing time. Visitors can explore and experience knowledge with all their senses in the storytelling of four parts: four digital and interactive installations, graphics, animated videos compiled with data based on scientific evidence. An example of this approach is a digital wallpaper “painted” with data from the ESA – European Space Agency’s Copernicus program Sentinels (satellites to monitor our planet) that visually translates the scientific information for the public. The video – updated every month – shows the correlation between CO2 emissions by human activity, global warming, and natural phenomena such as floods, ice melting, rising sea levels.

Project Shasta brings AI-powered audio recording and editing to the web. A million stories wouldn't quench humanity's thirst for listening. Nor would a billion. There will never be enough stories. More people than ever wish to speak their story through podcasts. But, deciphering the intricacies of audio production is a buzzkill to many creators. Tools should inspire people to create, not discourage them from it. We built a tool that empowers anyone to tell their story through pro-sounding audio.

Government websites have a wealth of information but are often hard for citizens to navigate to find the answer to their specific questions. As a citizen, when you visit a government website with a question in mind, chances are you want a quick answer and a simple explanation, so you can be on your way. Unfortunately, this is not how the experience usually goes. On most govt websites, a lot of the time, you run into things like bad navigation, broken links, old content, and information that's hard to understand. Basically, a website rich with information isn't useful if the information cannot be easily accessed. Hard to use govt websites are frustrating for both citizens and City Hall. Honolulu’s city staff spends a lot of time answering phone calls from frustrated citizens who find the city website so unmanageable that calling for the information is inevitably easier. Honolulu Answers (answers.honolulu.gov) is a new approach to make it easier for people to get quick answers to their questions about city information and services. It's an open-source website that is citizen-focused, question-driven, and simplifies the govt website experience with a clean, easy-to-navigate design.

Menstruating individuals generally rely on visual cues to know when they have gotten their period. However, menstruating people who are blind or visually impaired have to rely on other senses including touch, smell or even taste to distinguish between blood and other bodily fluids, or rely on others to know when they've started their period. Moreover, it also inhibits their ability to make decisions regarding intercourse and pregnancy independently.

Every summer, a team of scientists from Queen Mary University travels to Cape Verde where they deploy sensors and trackers on nesting loggerhead turtles, to track them and understand their complex and mysterious behavioral patterns as they return to the ocean. The scientists came to Wolf In Motion to help make the complex data gained from the turtles more usable and understandable.

Nail art has exploded into mainstream demand due to social sharing – its one of the top 5 most shared items on Instagram and Pinterest with 8.5 billion dollars a year spent on nails. Yet keeping up with this trend can challenging. A basic salon manicure averages $20, but custom art on each finger can cost more than $50. DIY techniques are cheaper but they’re messy and require lots of skill, materials, and steady hands. Off-the-shelf nail wraps offer convenience but they eliminate the opportunity for creative self expression. So for most women, personalized nail art is an aspiration rather than reality – until now.

Algramo is representative as it proposes a new way of selling basic products in neighborhood stores by breaking the traditional logistics chain. Algramo seeks to solve the “poverty tax” which occurs when families, due to liquidity problems, can not buy in large formats and buy in small formats which are up to 40% more expensive due to logistical inefficiencies, marketing and packaging.

In 2010, for the first time ever Pepsi repositioned the brand from a Super Bowl advertising icon to a catalyst for ideas to refresh the world. The Pepsi Refresh Project was a game-changing pro-social endeavor for Pepsi to position themselves in the minds of consumers as a positive, optimistic force for change in communities, revolving around issues and ideas that people personally cared about. The Pepsi Refresh Project was designed to give millions of dollars in grants in the U.S. to fund good ideas, big and small, that move communities forward.

Studio H is a high school design/build curriculum for rural community benefit. Launched in Bertie County, North Carolina, the program now resides at Realm Charter School in Berkeley, California. By learning through a design sensibility and “dirt-under-your-fingernails” construction skills, we’re developing creativity, critical thinking, citizenship, and capital to give students the skills they need to succeed, while building the assets the community needs to survive. Given the opportunity to engage within a public education system, we believe the next generation will be the greatest asset and untapped resource in rural communities’ futures. Studio H is a different kind of classroom. We design, build, and transform.

Nova is a personal climbing wall that redefines bouldering training at home, making it a celebrated activity through a new take on design expression and a compelling interactive interface. Instead of colored holds usually found on regular training walls, Nova uses light to flexibly indicate a variety of climbing routes and difficulty levels. Users can select a route using their iPhone. Information about the training performance is used to offer personalized training. Nova is practical smart gear for climbing and offers various routes for training. When not in use the climbing wall makes use of lighting to create a modern ambience. Thus the design took into consideration two possible scenarios: training and ambient lighting while not in use. The wall consists of panels with pattern-cut-outs that can be scaled to fit different sizes of rooms and dedicated walls. The new experience proudly reflects the user's passion for their sport and lifestyle.