01.04.06 Telserra designer wins Microsoft Chairman’s award for PC Concept
Microsoft teams up with hardware manufacturers, design industry to challenge students, independent designers to rethink the look and functions of Windows-based PCs.
REDMOND, WA , Jan. 4, 2006 – Prashant Chandra’s idea for a new type of personal computer began taking shape when he was still in school in New Delhi , India and would misplace one of his paper notebooks or accidentally spill ink on an assignment.
The idea kept taking shape over the years, often at unlikely times. When Chandra would go jogging, he would think about alternatives when he would see young children carrying heavy book bags home from school. What was needed, Chandra realized, was a PC designed for teen-agers and college students to do academic work – and nothing else. Instead of traditional hard drives, it should include slots for students to plug in digital textbooks and notebooks, which could be stored on lightweight digital cards.
The idea would have remained nothing more than that – an idea – if Chandra, an industrial designer for a company in New Delhi, with no ties to mainstream PC manufacturers, hadn’t seen an advertisement in a magazine last summer for the Next Generation Windows OS PC Design Competition.
Chandra’s “School Pak” PC is much more than an idea now. Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates selected it over the nearly 200 other entries to receive the Chairman’s Award, one of the inaugural PC-design contest’s four awards.
Kevin Eagan, general manager of Microsoft’s Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) Division, announced two of the four winners today at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, spotlighting them as innovative new directions in PC design in front of the world’s media and electronics industry leaders. In addition to the Chairman’s Award that Chandra received, Sungho Son, a graduate student in industrial design at Purdue University, took home the Judge’s Award for a prototype “bookshelf” computer, which uses interchangeable components roughly the shape and size of a hardbound book to simplify management of digital content and copyrights. Two public choice awards, selected by visitors to the competition’s Web site, http://www.startsomethingpc.com, will be announced on the site next week.
The winners announced at CES would each receive cash prizes of US$50,000; the public choice winners will receive $25,000 each. Also, the winning designs will be featured on the competition’s Web site for PC hardware manufacturers and others in search of novel, new designs.
Microsoft introduced the competition in 2005 in collaboration with the Industrial designers Society of America (IDSA) and two PC manufacturers, Dell and HP, to help commemorate the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Windows and the upcoming release of the next version of the operating system, Microsoft Windows Vista. Based on strong interest and positive feedback, Microsoft plans to hold the competition annually.