This year marks twenty years of me wearing spectacles. They started as chunky, colorful Acetate frames and made their way to sleek Metallic frames, with one brief period in between where I tried contact lenses. This story is about that time. I remember dressing up to go to prom, deciding I’d show up without those geeky spectacles. I was facing the mirror, contact lens on my finger, ready to put it on. It was a warm summer day and the fan was on in the room. The lens, balancing precariously on my finger, managed to catch the breeze and flew off my fingertip, landing flat on the mirror. I went to peel the lens off… and only half the lens peeled off. I was left holding a semi-circular piece of rather expensive hydrogel, while the other semi-circle stay put on the mirror. Cut to the prom, where I sat in a corner drinking fruit juice and wearing clunky frames.
Wow, I feel like I’ve shared a lot with you, so I might as well just get to the point here. The Push Lens Case, if it existed in 2007, would have altered my life. Designed as a case/holder, and even an applicator, the Push Lens Case allows you to store your lenses efficiently, without mixing up the left and the right. It also lets you apply your lenses without the aforementioned (albeit rare) woes. The case also adopts a clever truncated cylindrical design that prevents it from rolling off surfaces like tabletops! Yes, I’m impressed, but after a 20-year relationship with my spectacles, I think I’ll stick to the glasses.
The Push Lens Case is a Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
Not ideally the first thing one would picture in mind upon hearing the words Honey Strip, but all in all this product is rather fascinating. Using the Honeycomb structure’s spatial efficiency along with electricals to create a modular power strip, the Honey Strip lets you plug individual points into one another to create an extension board that not only fits your space requirements, but also looks like an interesting work of art rather than one of those ugly store-bought power strips.
Made of independent hexagonal units that can plug into one another, and also let you plug your gadgets, appliances into it, the Honey Strip is infinitely customizable. It even comes with these halos around the plug-points that give off a warm light when on, allowing it to serve as a patterned ambient light too, aside from fulfilling your power needs!
The Honey Strip is a Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
The Muul light isn’t as much about the light itself but is more about the effects of it. Look at that pattern and it looks innately familiar, but also incredibly calming. The Muul harnesses water’s ability to bend light, creating a caustic network of beautiful light patterns that sway and change with the water’s ripples. When you switch the Muul on, you’re immediately audience to these beautiful reflections as they dance around Muul’s blank canvas, created from a small pool suspended right below the canvas itself. The pool holds the water (which is gently agitated by an electromagnetic ball, creating ripples) while lights around its rim shine down on the water, causing the caustic reflections to shimmer on the white surface above.
What’s incredible is Muul’s ability to not be a light, but rather a phenomenon caused by it. It isn’t designed to make your room brighter, but rather, to make it more beautiful, setting an ever-changing ambiance that is restless, but also at the same time, relaxing!
The Muul Light is a Silver Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
The Foldish (a portmanteau of the words fold and dish) is a collapsible dish holder that can go from a seemingly spherical shape to a linear arrangement, allowing you to arrange dishes with space in between so that they don’t clatter against one another. It’s a rather simple and playful alternative to most dish racks that are just boring rectangular wire-frames that hold your crockery. When closed, the Foldish takes up a nice, compact spherical shape (thanks to the wire structures that give it a globular appearance), but it’s a rather engaging and hypnotic experience to slide the Foldish open, turning it into a linear setup into which you can place your dishes. It makes for a rather interesting presentation if your dishes have patterns or designs on them, as they now arrange themselves in a manner that beautifully displays them like you would in your display cabinets!
The Foldish is a Silver Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
Plenty of companies have tried to get clever with the pop-top can but this one is actually a functional twist that makes perfect, simple sense! Everyone’s experienced a drink mix up at one time or another and this packing concept, called My Can, helps to prevent that situation. After pulling up the tab, simply fold it over the rim and mark the first letter of your name to indicate that it’s your drink! Perfect for parties, you’ll never get mixed up even after a few brewskis!
The My Can is a Bronze Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
It takes usually 3 minutes for your tea leaves to reach peak flavor. Take the leaves out sooner and you haven’t used them to their full capacity, and leave them in for longer and you’ve got over-steeped, bitter tea. So how do you ensure you steep your teabag for exactly 3 minutes? Kang Yeonsoo has a pretty ingenious answer.
Merging teacup and hourglass, Yeonsoo’s contraption lets you time your brew. The tea rests in the container at the top while the hourglass at the base of the cup lets you keep time rather accurately. Once the last grain of sand travels from the upper chamber to the lower chamber, take your teabag out, knowing that your brew is just perfect!
The Hourglass Teacup is a Silver Winner of the K-Design Award for the year 2017.
In just its sixth year, the K-Design Award does something unusually brilliant in the fact that it sets its sight on design thinking, rather than just the final output… rewarding creativity first and then execution. In doing so, it sets the correct precedent by encouraging outstanding ideas that will live on longer than the products that embody them.
Having been initiated in the year 2012, the K-Design looked to reward good design that was backed by a strong concept. Past winners of the K-Design award include everybody from independent designers, to students, to even the likes of large studios and companies like Dell, Elago, LG, etc… and this year you could join those ranks too! The K-Design Award, now in its 2018 leg, is accepting entries (within the Industrial Design and Space Design categories) from all over the world, to create a map of winning ideas that will disrupt 2018 and the years ahead. Don’t believe me? Scroll down to take a look at our favorite winners from the year gone by!
The winners below showcase a beautiful blend of progressive thinking and an execution that makes you fall in love with the product as well as the idea behind it.
Think your project is a winning combination of concept and execution? Enlist your work for the K-Design Award 2018 here!!
YD Handpicks: 5 Inspirational designs from the K-Design Award 2017
01. Heng Balance Lamp by Zanwen Li
The Heng-Balance Lamp remains a hot favorite for the way it breaks the concept of what a switch should look like. The Heng turns the methodical switching on and off of a lamp into a game, paving the way for more products to turn mundane experiences into incredible, interactive design!
02. No-1 Series by Park Jungju
The very antithesis of DIY, the No-1 Series explores an aesthetic where functionality is derived from something that’s designed to feel incomplete in assembly. Designed to look like the plastic assembly kits you’d get with DIY toys, the No-1 Series features an entire range of furniture with its unusual yet functional aesthetic. What’s worth noticing is also the fact that even though each product features multiple parts, they all are united by the “runners” that make them look like single-piece injection-molded products.
03. 2in1 Funnel by Zhang Jiang and Zanwen Li
The effective combination of a funnel and container, this fun-tainer is a dream product to have around. Its silicone shape is easy to work with as well as clean, while the vibrant color adds a dash of freshness to your kitchen. Besides, in both forms, you’re only using the inner surface of the funnel, making sure you always know which surface to keep spotlessly clean!
04. Airblock by Makeblock Co. Ltd.
Drone flying may seem difficult, but Airblocks makes drone building easy! Just by simply allowing you to plug different propeller units to a hub, the Airblocks gives you not just the joy of flight, but of also being able to orchestrate the entire project. What’s more, the modules can even be plugged into a hovercraft base, giving you two toys in one package! The Airblocks showcase innovation from concept, to execution, to even material selection. The blocks come made from expanded polystyrene that are not only lightweight but also impact resistant, letting you go wild with your creations!
05. Smart Net by Ju Young Kim & Chang Choi
The Smart Net is quite fascinating. Not only do its pillars contain infrared sensors, tracking ball movements, its net also contains an optical fiber weave that is capable of displaying scores to the players every time a point is made. Whether net displays the score in the correct orientation to both players (at any time one player sees an inverted image) seems like something of a tiny hurdle, but the idea of bringing interactivity to sports equipment is definitely something we’re going to see more of in the future! Just imagine… Football with goalposts that light up when you score!
