Tag Archives: Design Award

The SIT Furniture Design Award’s 2021 winners show how seating and furniture are reinventing themselves

Posted on by




If we’re going to spend an entire year at home, at least give us great furniture, am I right?? Well, the SIT Furniture Design Award was initiated to scout and reward just that – furniture that breaks all boundaries and reinvents the category with fresh approaches and new ideas. The award accepts submissions from all around the world with the aim of recognizing good design within the furniture and interior categories while even highlighting trends and rewarding emerging talent.

SIT focuses on “Seat and Beyond”, rewarding strategic thinking and imagination which goes into making great equipment. The award has even created a digital “Innovation Center” focusing every year on a topic highlighting invention, look at today’s challenges, and how to overcome them. Designs are selected and judged by an esteemed jury panel of creative minds and leaders in the Industrial Designers world. Winners selected by the jury win a trophy, a Digital brochure featuring their entry, and an extensive digital marketing campaign to help propel their brand and their creative work forward. A special winner of the “Innovation Center” even receives a cash prize of $4000 to help them prototype their design and/or take it to production.

This year’s SIT Furniture Design Award winners cover the broad categories of furniture and interior design. Sitting on a wide spectrum between artistic and utilitarian, these designs aim at being creative, innovative, expressive, and solving a problem. Scroll down to see some of our favorite winning designs from this year’s SIT Furniture Design Award (including the Innovation Center Winner). If you’re a furniture/interior designer yourself, don’t despair! The awards are accepting entries for their 2021 edition – you can even snag yourself a 15% Early Fees discount if you submit your design before July 31st, 2021!

Click Here to See All the SIT Design Award Winners!

SecretAir by Wouter Myny

A winner of the “Innovation Center” award, the SecretAir is a magical wooden block that transforms right into a completely detailed workspace whenever you need. The design brief for the SecretAir was simple: A high-end home office solution that’s comfortable and practical during working hours, invisible after work. The office space finds a way of being both discreet as well as feature-rich at the same time. The main flap stays closed to keep your important papers and your laptop/desktop enclosed when you’re not working. However, open the flap up and secure it using its built-in magnets and you have a large, customizable workspace that accommodates all your belongings and needs without eating too much into your room’s floor space. As a winner of the “Innovation Center” award, SecretAir’s designer Wouter Myny will receive a prize of $4000 to help build a prototype of his winning design.

MEMORIA Chair by Sergio Sesmero

Looking like a piece of cloth draped on a chair (without the chair), the MEMORIA is a groundbreaking, avant-garde chair proposal that uses a concrete fabric to realize its unique, gravity-defying design. The material, generally referred to as Concrete Canvas, is a flexible fabric impregnated with concrete, which hardens when hydrated and forms a thin, durable, waterproof, and fire-resistant layer. The prototyping technique ensures each chair is unique in the way the chair looks and the fabric folds, along with a bespoke brutalist concrete texture on its surface. Looks really expressive, don’t you think?

Voxel Chair by Karim Rashid for Vondom

Designed to be low-poly as well as expressive, captivating as well as stackable, the Voxel Chair by Karim Rashid presents a unique structural shape – angular and faceted, only possible due to production by injection molding. Its weight is distributed in a balanced way due to its smartly designed shape. Its lightweight body makes it easy to transport and arrange. The armchair is a minimal simple yet voluminous stackable chair that is faceted just in the perfect places for comfort, just in the right angles for hyper-strength. Made of injected polypropylene with fiberglass, the Voxel chair comes in multiple colors and is equally appealing indoors as well as outdoors.

Lattice Chair by Kuan Design Studio

With a name that perfectly describes the chair’s visual style, the Lattice Chair is an interesting single-arm-chair made from interwoven strips of wood. Designed for comfort as well as for that interesting aesthetic, the chair comes with a single armrest, allowing you to sit with complete postural flexibility. Its cushion is made from high-quality Taiwanese bamboo strips, known for their excellent toughness. The result is a chair that weighs a mere 4 kilos, but can take up to 120 kilos of weight.

DCP Chair by Corvin Cristian Studio

The DCP Chair’s split-seat design reminds me of Herman Miller’s Osso chair, although designer Corvin Cristian describes his design as a “steampunk take on Eames, Calder and Prouve meets nostalgia for the heavy-duty workshop furniture.” The chair, which can be found in quite a few cafés and restaurants in Bucharest, comes with solid local ash legs, a metal structure, and an ash plywood seat and backrest. The chair is often also accompanied by a matching table with a similar design approach.

Raw Low Stool by Artl

With the proportions of a tiny sled, the Raw Low Stool is a neat, portable, wood and wickerwork stool that can be disassembled and carried around anywhere. Made for the nomadic bend of mind, the stool embraces a sense of flexibility in modern life. The Raw Low stool is made of hardwood and the two parts come together with a mortise and tenon joinery. When separated, the individual parts can easily be carried around by hand, with the wicker and wood seat slinging across your shoulder thanks to a nifty strap!

A Chairs by Yi-an Hung

4 chairs, 4 colors, one nesting design! With its matryoshka-doll nesting ability, the ‘A Chairs’ goes from one chair to two chairs and two stools. Everything nests into the larger red chair, making it easy to store and transport around… but if you ever need a footrest for yourself and a friend, or seating for 4 people, the design ‘explodes’ into multiple furniture units! And it looks absolutely vibrant too!

Sissi Chair by Michele Franzina

What’s unique about the Sissi chair is that it blurs the common archetype of seating design. It doesn’t come with a traditional seat and 4 legs, but rather is made of a singular ribbon-like surface that assumes the role of the chair’s parts while still looking like a magical strip you can sit on. Made from stress-resistant polyurethane foam on a tubular metal frame, the chair’s unique design features a multifunctional upper segment that can be used as a backrest, a single arm-rest, or even an attached table for your laptop as you work. Talk about breaking stereotypes!

Mono Chair by Philip Kronqvist for Hamari Auditorium

Designed originally for theaters and cinema halls, this Piet Mondrian-inspired chair is a marvel of design and engineering! Titled the Mono, it exists as a 4.7-inch thick monolithic slab when closed, but unravels into a cinema-style seat with armrests when you pull it open. A unique lever mechanism for the seat and armrests makes them rise synchronously by one movement, and its slim, collapsed shape provides extra space and allows more chairs to fit into a given area. The only thing missing? A place to rest your drinks and popcorn! Watch the chair in action below!

Click Here to See All the SIT Design Award Winners!

Lexus Design Award announces its Grand Prix winner for 2021, the ‘Portable Solar Distiller’

Posted on by




Earlier today, Lexus Design Awards announced their winner for the 2021 edition of their award program on April 27th. The winning project ‘Portable Solar Distiller’ by Henry Glogau was declared the Grand Prix Winner, surpassing 2,079 other design entries from 66 countries. Chosen as the project that best encompasses “Design for a Better Tomorrow”, the Portable Solar Distiller provides clean drinking water by filtering polluted water or overly saline sea water using sunlight. Merging local resource production with community architecture, this low-
tech solution also serves as a shaded gathering place.

The ‘Portable Solar Distiller’ was selected as the Grand Prix Winner from a roster of 6 finalists. Initially named the Solar Desalination Skylight, the design went through the mentorship phase under the expertise of Joe Doucet, Sabine Marcelis, Mariam Kamara, and Sputniko! These four world-class creators guided the finalists in surmounting challenges, helping refine and define the project and bring it to a fully refined stage. The 6 finalists were judged by an elite jury panel comprising Paola Antonelli, Dong Gong, Greg Lynn, and Simon Humphries, the elite panels who judged the entries. After selecting the Grand Prix winner, Judge Greg Lynn commented that “The winner was one of the designers who surprised me the most from the application to the final submission. The consistent mission of the winner persisted while the transformation in scale and social function was exemplary. The design became more refined, more functional and more open-source during the [mentorship] process”. Senior Curator at MoMA and Judge of the Lexus Design Award 2021, Paola Antonelli added, “It is heartening, after a year of isolation and “suspension,” to see that designers are still so firmly focused on the widespread issues connected to the environmental crisis. Our Grand Prix Winner tackled water shortage in exquisite low-tech fashion, using universal technologies that make it scalable and deployable worldwide.”

The Portable Solar Distiller by Henry Glogau aims at providing communities with easy access to fresh drinking water by relying on a highly-effective yet low-cost filtration method using sunlight. Its large canopy serves a dual purpose – harvesting sunlight to help purify water through evaporation, and acting as a community center for people to gather under during the day or even at night. The Portable Solar Distiller’s open-source schematic can easily be tweaked and implemented by anyone, allowing the design solution to have a wider reach and impact. The Portable Solar Distiller is designed in a way that can be carried, opened out, and assembled anywhere. Almost like a beach umbrella, it provides shade for groups of people, while having the added benefit of being able to purify water. The un-drinkable water goes into the canopy on the top, and heat from the sun causes the water to evaporate. Pure drinking water condenses on the upper part of the canopy, trickling down into a jerry can that fills up over time, giving people fresh water that can be consumed or used to cook food. Aside from providing free drinking water, the portable nature of the solution and its ability to create community gathering areas under the shaded canopy are what make the Portable Solar Distiller such an effective design that delivers on the promise of a ‘better tomorrow’.

Take a look at all the Lexus Design Awards Finalists featured on Yanko Design.

Designer: Henry Glogau

Click Here to See the Grand Prix Winner and the Finalists!

Portable Solar Distiller by Henry Glogau

A holistic approach to providing coastal informal settlements with water, energy and natural light. The design utilizes abundant solar energy and seawater to create a Portable Solar Distiller. It emits a natural diffused light, produces drinking water, and utilizes leftover salt brine for energy creation.

Testing was done within an informal settlement home over a one-month long expedition to Antofagasta, Chile. Over a 12- hour period the prototype could produce 540 ml of purified water, with a reduction of salinity levels from 36,000ppm (parts per million) down to 20ppm.

Salt brine waste from the evaporation process is further used to create a source of energy through a reaction when placed in storage tubes holding copper and zinc. These 12 salt batteries provided 9.53 volts, powering a LED light strip during the night and charged by a mini solar panel during the day.

As well as the functional performance, the desalinated water adds a morphing dappled effect that changes mood throughout the day, creating a soft ambiance for the living room space where family activities take place.

Click Here to See All Six Lexus Design Awards Finalists!

This innovative skylight uses light from the sun to purify drinking water

Posted on by

What if the sun could purify our water? What if it didn’t require human intervention or energy? What if this low-cost solution could empower coastal regions with an abundance of saline water but minimal access to drinking water? Designer Henry Glogau’s Solar Desalination Skylight knocks multiple proverbial birds with one stone. It serves as a no-cost lighting solution for low-income households, while also using the sun to desalinate drinking water.

The Solar Desalination Skylight is a finalist of the LEXUS DESIGN AWARD 2021. Currently in their 9th year, the Lexus Design Awards are on a mission to ideate and innovate for a better future for humanity as well as for the planet. With their underlying theme of “Designing for a Better Tomorrow”, the awards program looks at solutions that have a uniquely positive impact on society, humanity, and in the process, to reward a new generation of designers for their impactful ideas. The Lexus Design Award’s core objective has always been to foster great ideas and great talent. Creating the perfect environment for a design to grow, LEXUS helps engineer ideas into real, impactful solutions. Apart from accelerating, developing, and promoting design projects, the Lexus Design Award helps kickstart design careers too, with exclusive mentorships from international design stalwarts like Joe Doucet, Mariam Kamara, Sabine Marcelis and Sputniko!, as well as funding for prototypes (up to 3 million Japanese Yen or $25,000 per project) and the opportunity to have your work judged by the biggest figures in design in the final Grand Prix competition. This year’s judges include Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator at MoMA), Dong Gong (Founder and Principal Designer at Vector Architects), Greg Lynn (Architect and CEO at Piaggio Fast Forward), and Simon Humphries (Head of Toyota and Lexus Global Design).

Needless to say, the Solar Desalination Skylight’s purpose aligns perfectly with the awards’ theme of Designing for a better tomorrow. The design uses free and abundant solar energy and seawater to create a diffused light as well as clean, potable freshwater. The residual brine in the purification process is further used as chemical energy to power the diffused light after nightfall. The result is a design that’s cheap, impactful, and makes brilliant use of the resources at its disposal. Seawater is fed through a pipe into the chandelier-shaped skylight. Aside from illuminating interiors, the design uses energy from the sun to distill the salty seawater, which is accessible through a tap at the very base of the skylight. At night, the residual saltwater is used to generate an electrical charge which powers the light, creating a closed-loop that uses abundant resources to their maximum extent to benefit humanity.

The Solar Desalination Skylight is one of the six finalists of the LEXUS DESIGN AWARD 2021. Stay tuned as we feature all the finalist designs following the Grand Prix Winner Announcement here on Yanko Design!

Designer: Henry Glogau

Click Here to See All Six Lexus Design Awards Finalists!

Solar Desalination Skylight

A holistic approach to providing coastal informal settlements with water, energy and natural light. The design utilizes abundant solar energy and seawater to create a Solar Desalination Skylight. It emits a natural diffused light, produces drinking water, and utilizes leftover salt brine for energy creation.

Click Here to See All Six Lexus Design Awards Finalists!

The Lexus Design Award is on a mission to make the world better. Here’s how you can participate!

Posted on by

I’ve noticed something rather interesting over the past couple of years. The purpose of a design, any design, is to see itself evolve in a way that benefits users as well as the designer that had the idea in the first place. A well-designed product isn’t something that can exist in isolation with a ribbon pinned to it… yet most award programs do just that. They look at products, identify a few of them which look promising, give them a certificate or trophy, and move on to the next product… and the process repeats itself year after year. Most award programs don’t incubate great ideas into wonderful products… they just identify them and put them on a website for others to see, and that’s something I’ve come to identify with a lot of awards, but not the Lexus Design Award.

Imagine having great designers gather around your idea and nourish it into something truly fruitful. Imagine having all the resources you need to prototype your idea into something that WORKS… not on paper, in reality. Imagine spending 3 months under the wing of industry-leading mentors who help guide you through the design process. The Lexus Design Award isn’t really like other awards… it’s part award, part internship, part incubator, and part institute. When you apply for the Lexus Design Award, you’re enrolling yourself into a 3-month course with internationally-recognized mentors like Joe Doucet (Founder, Joe Doucet x Partners), Mariam Kamara (Principal Architect, Atelier Masomi), Sputniko! (Associate Professor of Design at the Tokyo University of the Arts), and Sabine Marcelis (Founder, Studio Sabine Marcelis. Out of all the award participants, 6 Finalists are chosen to be a part of this mentorship experience. During this time, the mentors work with you ON your project (sort of like the most personalized internship ever), taking your rough concept to fruition, while Lexus incubates the product with as much as 3 million Japanese Yen or $25,000 dedicated to prototyping the projects to a working proof-of-concept.

The Lexus Design Award’s core objective has always been to foster great ideas and great talent. Creating the perfect environment for a design to grow, Lexus helps engineer ideas into real, impactful solutions for a better future. The awards are free for all, focusing on young talent looking to find their footing in the industry, and offering them the ability to take their nascent ideas to new heights, with advice from established professional mentors. At the end of the mentorship phase, a Grand Prix finalist is chosen by the award’s esteemed judging panel comprising of Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator at MoMA), Greg Lynn (Architect and CEO Piaggio Fast Forward), Dong Gong (Founder & Design Principal of Vector Architects), and Simon Humphries (Head of Toyota and Lexus Global Design).

Entries for the 2021 edition of the Lexus Design Award are now open, with the theme echoing Lexus’ brand principle – “Anticipate, Innovate and Captivate for a better tomorrow”. Head to the Discover Lexus website to submit your own designs for a chance to collaborate with world-class mentors and incubate your ideas into reality, or scroll down to check out some of the past winners of the Lexus Design Award as inspiration!

Submit Your Designs Now for Lexus Design Award 2021. Last Date for Submissions: October 11th, 2020.

Lexus Design Award Past Winners

Lexus first launched this annual international award in 2013 to nurture up-and-coming designers and help them realize their vision around the future of design.

Open Source Communities by BellTower (2020 Grand Prix Winner)

A vast number of Kenyans suffer from a combination of problems like water shortage, diseases caused by consumption of unfiltered/unfit water, having to walk miles to get water on a daily basis, or alternatively having to pay high rates for local water distribution. “In Nairobi, high-tech coexists with urban poverty”, say the team at BellTower, who designed the Open Source Communities project which creates a new format of community-building that relies on efficient allocation of resources that help the lower-income communities get access to basic necessities like water. The project creates a centralized water-reservoir – a structure that sits between hundreds of homes, providing water to every single one of them. The structure’s innovative format allows it to harvest and conserve rainwater, while actively filtering it of dirt, microorganisms, and other impurities. During the monsoons, surplus water helps generate money for the communities too, allowing them to get an extra source of income while bridging the vast resource gap. However, the best part about the Open Source Communities is that it exists as a public-utility template. Its open-source nature gives it unlimited flexibility, allowing it to be modified to fit in practically any scenario.

Algorithmic Lace by Lisa Marks (2019 Grand Prix Winner)

Bringing Algorithms and Attire together in a beautifully crafted garment with a noble purpose, Algorithmic Lace uses advanced three-dimensional modeling to handcraft bespoke bras for breast cancer survivors who have undergone mastectomy surgery. Algorithms have a long-standing love-affair with the textile industry, as one of the first machines to use algorithms was the Jacquard Loom back in the 1800s. The loom was controlled by a series of punched cards, which contained information that the loom read. Different cards had different algorithms into it and by switching the cards in the loom, you could tell it to alternate between complex textile weaves like brocade, damask and matelassé. Algorithmic Lace builds on that rich history, by using lines of code to create bras that are custom-built for their wearers. These garments are made specifically to functionally suit women who’ve undergone surgery, and the algorithmic pattern helps create a well-fitted, comfortable brassiere that’s also incredibly aesthetic to look at, empowering the wearer with confidence, along with their new lease of life.

Pixel by Hiroto Yoshizoe (2017 Grand Prix Winner)

There’s sheer magic in how the Pixel can actually take what you see and reduce its resolution to a handful of pixels… creating an illusion of being in a low-res world. At its heart is a uniquely crafted module that takes light as an input, and through repeated internal reflection, turns inputted images into square outputs. Imagine how the mirrors on a periscope work, taking an image from the top and carrying them down to the viewfinder below… this module does something similar, but with a different result. Stack enough of these modules together and you get the Pixel, a dynamic wall that instantly pixelates anything behind it. The Pixel relies on a powerful light source, and in this case, uses a projector. Project an image on it and the modules average out the light entering them, instantly pixelating the image and giving us a new perspective on the way we see light and shadows!

Agar Plasticity by AMAM (2016 Grand Prix Winner)

As its name suggests, the Agar Plasticity project uses Agar, a gelatinous marine algal material, as a replacement for plastics, creating a naturally occurring alternative to one of nature’s largest pollutants. Perfectly encapsulating the Lexus theme of ‘designing for a better tomorrow’, the project envisions a use of Agar as an alternative to the plastics found in packaging. Given that packaging for a product is often discarded immediately after purchase, Agar Plasticity hopes to create a solution that is eco-friendlier. Agar itself is derived from nature, and when treated a certain way, can be molded into containers, trays, and films that can replace single-use plastics. When discarded, the Agar can easily degrade in water or land, turning into nutrition for microorganisms and helping reduce waste. Japan-based design-trio AMAM is currently working to get larger institutions and corporations to look into the use of Agar as a safe plastic-alternative.

Inaho by Hideki Yoshimoto and Yoshinaka Ono (2013 Grand Prix Winner)

Yet another example of how lighting can be more of an experience, Inaho captures the tranquil beauty of watching rice-plants sway in the breeze. Created by Japanese duo Hideki Yoshimoto and Yoshinaka Ono, Inaho captures a strong Japanese cultural element, creating something that’s not just eye-catching but also rooted in history. The lights come mounted on tall, flexible metal rods, which gently lean towards people as they approach it. The interactive element doesn’t just make the Inaho interesting in a tactile sense, it also creates a wonderful series of moving highlights and shadows as the rice-plant-inspired lamps lean in your direction as you approach them, prompting you to move closer. The word Inaho literally translates to ‘a ear of rice’ in Japanese.

Submissions are being accepted until October 11th, 2020.

This 3-in-1 dishwasher was designed to fit in your sink – a 2020 kitchen essential!

Posted on by

 

Safe to say that the most hated chores are either doing laundry or doing the dishes. There is something about warm, dryer sheet scented laundry that kind of makes it worth it, so doing dishes is the most annoying household task in my list. I also feel like dishwashers are so awkwardly located, you have to bend too often and that can be a problem if you have a physical disability or if you are over the age of 26 because you have spent a good amount of time slouching over your devices. To make life easier for us all, Fotile has designed a 3-in-1 dishwasher that actually fits in your sink! Yes, that is correct – your sink is now a place for dirty as well as clean dishes.

This clever design hides your dishwasher and dryer elegantly by welding it to your stainless steel sink. The dishwasher has a larget fillet that facilitates accelerated rotation of water flow to improve the efficiency of wash cycles. Another great perk of it being fitted in your sink is that it reduces the hassle of cleaning inside the appliance. It also has a flat embedded ‘lid’ which makes it easy for you to keep your countertop clean while not sacrificing surface space. Apart from killing 99.99% of bacteria from the dishes, it also doubles up as a fruit and vegetable purifier. Using ultrasonic technology and a turbulent spray, it removes 90% of pesticide residue from your produce. This dishwasher claims to have no blind spots – 360-degree cleaning and drying!

The Fotile dishwasher is perfect for any home but especially urban homes because they don’t come with appliances (trust me, I had to apartment hunt in Manhattan which meant I chose dishwasher over having a living room), even more so when they are traditional bulky washers. Not just small apartments, but any home could benefit from space optimization with this in-sink dishwasher. It is also uses resources more efficiently and cuts the time + energy taken by existing dishwashers into half! Clean, convenient, and (very) cool.

Designer: Fotile

How to win a design award: A handy guide

Posted on by

If you haven’t read our piece on What Awards Do For Your Design Career, I do recommend you check that out first. An award is instant validation. It puts a stamp of approval on your work, your process, and even you as a designer, helping you stand out from the rest. Awards, aside from validation, also have a number of additional benefits. Cash prizes, trophies, internship opportunities, interested funders/clients, collaborators, and just a fast-track to getting your work seen by thousands if not millions. Here, we try to break down the process of applying for a design award and deliver some insights on what you can do to maximize your chances of winning one. This is, by no means, some cheat-sheet or a hack, but just a very structured way of choosing your battles properly and having the correct strategy in place to win them. So let’s dive in, shall we?

WHAT ARE YOU GUNNING FOR?

You’ve got a project, you want an award. Pretty simple, right? Actually, it’s much more complicated than that! Awards, as many as they are, don’t operate on the same principle. Yes, they do reward great design, but a few things change from award to award… the most noteworthy ones being –

A. Different award programmes reward different aspects/types of design. Not all awards are the same.
B. Jury panels vary from award to award, and from location to location.
C. Prizes vary from award to award too.
D. Budget – Perhaps the most crucial part of a design award. Awards require money. Some more than others.

So ask yourself what you’re gunning for. You could be looking for a stamp of approval on your work/portfolio, or you could be looking for potential collaborators/investors, or even press coverage. You could perhaps do it for the prize money, or a dream job. Based on what you exactly want to achieve, your choice of which design award to apply for will change. Here are a few steps to help you get on the right path.

KNOW YOUR AWARD

Every award is different. It’s important to do a little research on the awards, their requirements, etc. If you’ve got a conceptual product, maybe an award for design concepts is your best bet. If you’ve got a product/proof of concept and you’re looking to take it forward, an award that grants you that sounds like a perfect plan of action. Some awards are category-specific too. There are awards that are strictly for architecture, some specifically for designs aimed at enabling people with special needs, and some just for consumer electronics, or even earth-friendly. Sometimes an award could be country-specific as well. Knowing which award suits your requirements, and which award your project fits best into really goes far to help secure your spot on the winner’s stand.

Spend a healthy amount of time reading the award’s About Us page. See what their aim is, what their ethos is. Take things a step further and look at past winners to get a better idea of the qualitative standard the award demands. Ask yourself if your work compares to theirs. You wouldn’t design a product without putting in a healthy amount of research, so why would you send your product for an award without doing your due diligence too, right?


The MOTOROiD by Japanese Yamaha Motor Co Ltd won the Luminary Award at the 2018 Red Dot Concept Design Award. Red Dot is arguably one of the most well-known international award programs and is split into two legs, one specifically for product design, and one for concept design.

KNOW THE JURY

An award is perhaps the best way to get a panel of established designers and judges to look at your work. Look at the jury panels to see any noteworthy figures. Not only does the jury speak of the award’s qualitative standards, the jury is also a pretty great way to stick your foot in the door at a good design firm. Not sure what I meant? Imagine your favorite designer is on the jury panel for a design award. Sending your work to the award is a sure-fire way to get them to see your work. If they do like it, chances are they’ll remember you because of your project, making it easier to strike up a chat with them, or to even get an opportunity to work for/with them!


A camera for the visually impaired, the 2C3D Camera secured a win at the Asia Design Prize in 2018. The 2019 jury panel is presided over by none other than Karim Rashid, among some incredibly noteworthy talents.

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE

Here’s the most interesting bit… The reward! First and foremost, figure out what you’re really looking to achieve. Some awards give you media-coverage, some awards give you a cash prize, some awards give you job or internship opportunities, and most awards come with their fair share of recognition. If you’re looking to put your name on the map, choose a reputed national or international award… preferably one that has a strong marketing/publication component. If you’re looking for a cash prize to fund the growth of your product, some awards do give out hefty rewards to their winners, although winning them is definitely an uphill battle. If you’re looking to launch a product, look for an award that’s interested in prototyping your ideas. If you’re looking for a stellar work opportunity, some award programs reward internships or exchange programs too! (We’ve got a nifty design award guide coming up soon!) And here’s a critical bit. Always be prepared. Without sounding like a complete buzzkill, being handed an award is a great feeling, but it can often come with unintended consequences. Winning an award can often result in a lot of media coverage, and may open you up to a wide variety of counterfeiters, embroiling you in a copyright battle… and moreover, all awards require NDA clearance from your client, or your college, so make sure you’ve taken proper legal advice before applying for an award… Especially if you’re looking to file a patent later down the road.


The splendid, portable, lightweight, foldable EcoHelmet received the James Dyson Inventor Award in 2016. The James Dyson Award is always looking to find young innovators with life-changing ideas for products. The winning designs are reviewed by Sir James Dyson himself, and are entitled to a hefty cash prize to help kick-start their career or their product journey.

AWARDS ARE BUSINESSES TOO… YOU NEED TO PAY TO PLAY

It’s important to look at the award from the organizer’s perspective too. Medals, trophies, prizes, juries, exhibitions, galas, and a lot of moving parts in between them, they all require a budget… and more often than none, that budget comes from award application payments, which means you need to pay to enroll for the awards program. Depending on how grand the award is, its enrollment fee varies too, which can sometimes make awards an expensive ordeal. So, factor your budget into your choice of awards too. Some awards are cheaper for students, which is just great if you’re studying with no source of income and you’re looking to bootstrap your future career. In fact, some schools will even pay the entire or a portion of the fee just to help students out (after all, a school’s reputation does increase if its student wins an award). If you’re not a student, you may be required to pay full price, so make sure you allocate a sufficient amount. If you’ve worked with a client on the project, you can even ask them to pay for the award too… after all, they benefit the most from it because the award also goes to the product AND the company. Some companies use the award logo on their websites, products, or packaging, so it’s a win-win for everyone! Along with money, time plays a big role too. Make sure you’re ready with your project way in advance, so you can enroll during the early-bird stages of the award, and conveniently skip the hefty late-application fee if you cross the deadline. Conversely, if the award is free for all (because their business model relies on something else altogether), more power to you! Go for it, you rockstar!


The Humla Forest Recon Drone won the iF Design Talent Award in 2018. A separate award program dedicated to rewarding upcoming talent, the Design Talent Award is a branch of the widely known, international iF Design Award. It’s exclusively for design students and is completely free of any charge.

CHOSEN THE AWARD YOU WANT TO APPLY FOR? NOW PREPARE FOR IT.

Selecting the right award is just a mere first step. The application is the daunting bit. Make sure you do the following. First, carefully read through the guidelines to see if you and your design are applicable. Once that’s done, make sure you’re aware of the deadlines, and more importantly, the deliverables. Some awards require JPEGS in certain aspect ratios and sizes, some require PDFs, some actually require printed documents, and some make it a point to ask for videos of proof-of-concept, or even your actual product (to examine and/or to showcase at their exhibition). Go through your project with a fine-toothed comb making sure the renders aren’t pixelated, colors are accurate, and DEFINITELY avoid grammatical errors or typos. Ask a friend, colleague, or mentor for feedback on the layout, the aesthetics, and whether the information and design intent looks crisp and clear. You can even go one step further and ask past-winners of the award for some key pointers and tips. Never underestimate the power of a fresh perspective or a piece of critical advice.

Lastly, check to make sure your client, university, design-teammates, or even your boss are all okay with you sending the project for an award. Getting that approval is crucial because the last thing you want is to violate confidentiality agreements, or not credit an individual or organization if they played a part in your project! Once you get a green signal, and you’re happy with the quality of your output, and you’ve checked everything off your to-do list, send the application in! The earlier you send your application, the better. Not only do you save money on regular or late fees, but some competitions offer preliminary judging to give you pointers and feedback that can help make your application better. It’s always great to know that you’ve put in every bit of effort to deliver your best work!

What next? Well, you know what’s better than one award? Multiple awards! Securing accolades from multiple award programs and competitions is a sure-fire way to brand yourself as a great designer. Whether you’re a student, a professional, a team, or even a studio, winning awards is a great way to gain a reputation. It helps put you, your product, your client, your university, and even your own company/brand on the map! Applying for awards can be a daunting task, but the benefits definitely outweigh the demerits – besides, if you don’t apply, you can never win, right!? So I hope this guide should prove incredibly handy when you’re looking to send your work in for a design award! And hey, all the best!

Also Check Out: You’ve Won A Design Award, What Next?