This is a nice example for possible use with TMA04 (Food). Michael Johnson, Director of Johnson Banks was asked by Design Week what his favourite piece of design for 2009 was and he came up with this:
"The best thing I've seen this year is a food-labelling system in Japan by To Genko. The white food labels are printed to detect ammonia and darken when meat goes off. This means that a dark blue label equals 'off-meat', but the really clever bit is that the barcode is also nullified so it can't be sold. Genius. And genuinely useful"
It's also a good example of the design integration I describe in 'What is a Good Design Solution?'. What I also liked was that this is a great example of being able to tell a story about a future product without necessarily having to produce a working prototype, something that I think we'll be encouraging students to do in TMA04.
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