Folding@home Honored for Good Design

When many of you are done playing games or watching videos for the night, you chose to give back by launching Stanford University’s Folding@home application on your PLAYSTATION 3. Whether you do it to benefit society, or just because the visualizations look cool, over a million of you have found the experience to be rewarding. Now it’s Folding@home’s turn to be recognized.

Earlier today, the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization awarded Sony Computer Entertainment the “Good Design Gold Award 2008” for our support of the Folding@home project on PS3.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project which aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how they are related to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer.

We take special pride in the words said by the judges of the event, which gave the Gold award to only 15 projects out of over 3,000 nominees. In their words:

“Analysis of proteins for the purpose of shedding light on diseases is just one example of solution design for social issues, a stance that indicates the direction that design should take in the future. Motivating the people who will be involved in these studies will be the key to success, but the program functions well as an idea for making participation in this project visible on a global scale.”

Many people have worked to get this application working, both in Sony Computer Entertainment and in Stanford University, but all of this would not be doable without the participation and the donation given by you- the active community. So allow me to extend my thanks and hope to see you all continue to contribute to this important project.