Work by several young Industrial Design and Furniture Design alumni has been featured in news of late, with good reason.

A project by Adam Geremia [MID ‘07], Mike Hahn [MID ‘08] and Tom Weis [MID ‘08], in which they dissembled a Toyota truck and used the parts to build working prototypes for a neonatal incubator, was featured on the front page of a recent issue of The New York Times‘ “Science Times.” Adam, Mike and Tom were hired by the Cambridge, MA nonprofit Design that Matters, which creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. The RISD trio’s design fits naturally into the company’s mission, as the incubator is meant to keep vulnerable newborns in developing countries warm during the first fragile days of their lives.

The November/December issue of ID Magazine lauds the “holistic” approach to design manifest in the products produced by DBA, the design firm run by Leon Ransmeier [’99 FD] (that’s Leon in the picture in the animation above) and Erik Wysocan [’99 ID]. The magazine describes DBA’s approach as “wrest[ing] innovation from simplicity, creating products that are both obvious and necessary,” citing as examples their exquisitely uncomplicated (in design and name) Extension Cord, Humidifier and Notepads, among others.

Finally, the current issue of ID focuses on the “ID 40: Emerging Designers” and includes a profile of Rich, Brilliant, Willing, the firm whose principles are RISD Furniture Design alums Theo Richardson, Charles Brill and Alex Williams. In true RISD collaborative spirit RBW declares that their biggest creative inspiration is “each other.” (More on RBW here, in this earlier our.risd post.)