The winner of Mediamatic's El Hema design competition has been announced. First prize went to The White Room for their design Satellite Dish Sticker.

As previously mentioned, EL Hema is a humorous and slightly provocative project exploring what an Arabic version of the Dutch chain-store and superbrand Hema would be like and designers were invited to submit ideas for new Arab-Dutch products.

The winning design is a decorative add-on that enable people to pimp-up their uniform dull looking satellite dishes. According to the winner, satellite dishes are often associated with Arab countries but naturally the product is for anyone owning one

A shared second prize went to Eva Gonggrijp's henna-decorated dishwashing gloves and Nellie Keijzer's cotton pillowcase.

A list of all the nominated designs can be found here.

• Satellite Dish Sticker

One of my favorite art shows this year was Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting at the Musuem of Arts & Design in New York. A timely exhibition of work by international artists using fiber in unexpected and unorthodox ways.

Within the past 5 years or so, knitting has experienced quite a renaissance and it is no longer viewed as something of the 70's. One of the reasons for this comeback is the fashion cycle which traditionally brings dead things back into life sooner or later. Another reason is the possibilities and inspiration that new technologies provide.

An example of the latter is the knitting project Schalalala! by Rüdiger Schlömer (not included in the aforementioned exhibition).

Schalalala! is a fan-scarf project inspired by social media and remix culture. The project addresses the lack of flexibility and individual freedom when supporting a sport club. Either you are for team A or team B, you are with or against it.

In response to this situation, Rüdiger created a web based interface where people can re-mix existing club scarves in order to meet the individual need for flexibility, customization and fashion.

Schalalala! is primarily a digital project but people are encouraged to use the website as inspiration for knitting their own multi-fan-club scarves.

Related entry: Generative Knitting

• www.schalalala.de

'Goodbye Privacy' was the theme at this year's Ars Electronica festival and perhaps not so surprisingly, there were a handful of projects and exhibitions dealing with the presence of web and surveillance cameras in public spaces.

One of them, 'Self Portrait With Webcam' by the Austrian artist Josef Klammer, is a series of photographic images seen through the eyes of webcams at different Austrian locations.

Klammer himself appears on every image with his laptop, which he used to position and capture himself. Each self portrait in the exhibition is accompanied by a photograph of the webcam along with information about its physical location as well as its webadress.

Related entry: Surveillance Camera Players

• www.klammer.mur.at

Apparel combined with new media is often associated with 'wearable computing' and futuristic looking design. But the combination of the two can also lead to more conceptual results, such as the projects presented at the Campus 2.0 exhibition at the Ars Electronica festival.

'Struckmaschine' (Fabienne Blanc & Patrick Rüegg) is a knitting machine used to make scarves with unique patterns. The patterns are made of space-invaders and each pattern is automatically generated by the personal information on the buyer's credit card.

News Knitter (Ebru Kurbak & Mahir M Yavuz) is similar project that explore the potential of data-visualization. News Knitter collects and translates political news from the web into a visual form knitted into a sweater. The idea is to make sweaters that become evidences of a specific day or period.

Finally, 'GELSOMINA – The Voice Knitting Machine' (Hanna-Lisette Wiesener & Magdalena Kohler) is more abstract but at the same time, gives the user/buyer more individual control. Audio input (song, voice) is translated into a simple visual form to give a piece of clothing its own 'vocal fingerprint'.

• Struckmaschine • News Knitter • Voice Knitting Machine

AddArt is a subversive Firefox add-on currently being developed by the American artist Steve Lambert.

The concept is inspired by the popular Adblock add-on which removes ads from web pages. The main difference between the two is that AddArt will not just block ads, it will replace them with new images - images created by artists. So, the more ads you surf, the more art you'll get!

The idea is to run the AddArt concept somewhat like an art gallery with different curators responsible for organizing the shows.

AddArt is currently in prototype-mode but hopefully it will be functional soon.

• www.addart.eyebeam.org

The title sequence of a movie can be much more than just a trivial portion of credit lines - if used with creative sense it can effectively set the narrative stage.

Sometimes production studios invest so much time and creativity into designing these opening sequences that they become little cinematic masterpieces.

Just think of the legendary design by Saul Bass (e.g. Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo) as well as the opening sequences in more recent movies such as Se7en, Panic Room, Catch Me If You Can and so on.

The list is long and soon you will be able to get a better overview thanks to Dutch media platform Submarine Channel who has put together an online movie archive that consists of stunning title sequences.

The archive is not yet that extensive and the godfather of it all Saul Bass is not (yet) represented due to copyright issues - but the collection is growing and will hopefully turn into a comprehensive resource.

• Submarine Channel See also 10 kick ass opening credit sequences

The streets of Hamburg is the venue of an upcoming international award exhibition called Stickersafari.

As the name suggests, Stickersafari is dedicated to sticker-art and in the spirit of the medium, it takes place outdoor in Marktstraße in Hamburg from October 7 - November 7.

More than 5000 stickers from all over the world, have been submitted to the exhibition, which is organised by NO GALLERY – a gallery without space, showing contemporary art in unusual places.

• www.stickersafari.net

David Graas is a Dutch product designer who demonstrates that it doesn't necessarily take new technologies or materials to create new expressions - it simply takes new ideas.

One of his latest products 'This Side Up" is a set of sustainable stools made of a single sheet of cardboard.

The stools can be used as one single unit or transfomed into two separate stools by pulling them apart.

The cardboard text "THIS SIDE UP" is used by Graas, not merely as a product name but also as a user manual, which indicates how the stools are separated.

• This Side Up

Earlier this year Getty Images invited five renown interaction designers to take part in an interactive online exhibit called 10 ways.

As a point of departure, each of the designers were asked to create two interactive artworks based on two predefined themes.

The exhibit is now online and contains very nice works by Less Rain, Sumona, The Barbarian Group, Tomato and Great Works.

• 10 ways