Out of 1,078 entries, the 2000 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA00) jury honored 40 designs with the Gold award, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) announced recently. Published in the June 12 issue of Business Week magazine—co-sponsor of the program—the IDEA winners also include 70 Silvers and 51 Bronzes, for a total of 161 winners. The winners were selected by 16 jurors during two-and-a-half days of intense evaluation and debate.
Entries were submitted in 47 subcategories, ranging from cars and computers to museum exhibits and furniture. The jurors scored how well each entry fulfilled five criteria of industrial design excellence: design innovation; benefit to the user; benefit to the client/business; ecological responsibility; and appropriate aesthetics and appeal.
The following trends were noted by the jurors in the course of their deliberations:
- There is a new, elegant blending of the lush, rounded forms of recent years with sharper edges and cleaner lines.
- The boundaries are blurring between products (such as furniture, computers and related peripherals) that are traditionally designed for the workplace and those developed for the home office.
- The discipline of interface and interaction design is maturing. In the “now” applications, designers are providing a three-dimensional depth of perception and a range of new services and benefits for the user. For the long-term, work is expanding to break with the interaction barriers of keyboard and mouse to forge new, more human and more natural interfaces between people and technology.
- The opportunity for innovation lies everywhere, but very much in finding the right mix of functionality, design and place to serve people’s lifestyle needs.
Some noteable winners:
- Apple received five awards, two Golds and three Silvers
- Herman Miller won one Gold, two Silvers and one Bronze
- Target won one Gold, one Silver and two Bronzes
- IDEO won six awards, one Gold, three Silvers and two Bronzes
- Hauser Inc. received five, one Gold, two Silvers and two Bronzes
- Herbst Lazar Bell and ZIBA Design each received one Gold, one Silver and two Brnzes
- frogdesign received two Silvers and two Bronzes
- Design Continuum, Design Guys and Smart Design won three awards each.
- Teknion won a Gold award in the concept category for its Rug
- Steelcase won silver for its Leap chair and a bronze for its Canopy light, introduced just a few months ago.
The awards ceremony will take place in New Orleans on the evening of September 23, as the closing event of the IDSA’s 2000 International Design Conference. A gallery of the winners will be featured at that conference in The Fairmont Hotel (September 20-23) as well as on IDSA’s Web site, http://www.idsa.org, where the online IDEA00 Gallery is linked from the home page.
The goal of the IDEA is to foster business and public understanding about the impact of industrial design excellence on the quality of life and the economy. It is presented annually by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the nonprofit association that represents the profession of industrial design to education, business, government and the public and serves the profession’s needs for information and networking.
The deadline for entries to the IDEA01 competition is February 12, 2001. Entry materials will be available in November 2000. All entries must be either designed by a U.S. designer or, if designed elsewhere, must be in distribution in North America.
Visit www.idsa.org for detailed descriptions, photos and contact information on all 161 Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners.
