The iPhone, MacBook Pro, Tesla Model S, Oculus Rift, and Xbox all have one thing in common. They have all been awarded the International Design Excellence Award. A brand that rewards the best and the smartest in design, the awards are now back in their 42nd edition and you can apply too, for a chance to put your work on the same platform as some of the world’s greatest creatives!
The International Design Excellence Awards (or IDEA for short) are organized each year by the Industrial Designers Association of America (IDSA), America’s oldest and oldest organization for industrial designers. Originally founded to recognize exceptional achievement in industrial design, the program has since grown to highlight design in many connected disciplines including design strategy, branding, digital interaction, and much more. “For anyone who is a maker, who is building something, having an IDEA is the ultimate achievement. IDSA Member Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject, and multiple IDEA winner: IDEA is an award from designers, to designers,” says Yves Behar, IDSA Member, founder of fuseproject, and IDEA multi-winner.
Winning an IDEA idea puts your design on the largest creative platform out there, giving it recognition along with some of the most acclaimed and life-changing products of years past. Awards accept entries across a wide range of experience levels, with a section dedicated to students as well. Brand or studio size is unknown, IDEA rewards absolute creativity, and IDEA-winning designs and designers receive significant international publicity and exposure, including high profile industry promotion by IDSA and across the media. All winners are featured in IDSA’s annual Design Excellence Yearbook, a preeminent collector’s edition distributed to a global audience of design and business executives, and IDEA winning products are entered into the permanent collection of the Henry Ford Museum, where they remain—the current icons of creativity and mastery character. The designers also receive the highly coveted IDEA Award, which can be disassembled to display the IDEA lettering (you can view the history and process of designing the trophy in the video above!)
The 42nd Annual International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), presented by the Industrial Designers Association of America (IDSA), are now open for entries until March 21, 2022. Entries are open across a myriad of categories for designers, studios, brands, and even students. The categories for IDEA 2022 are Automotive and Transportation, Brands, Baby Products, Commercial and Industrial, Conceptual and Design Design, Consumer Technology, Design Strategy, Digital Interaction, Environments, Home (including kitchen and bathroom), Furniture and Lighting (including outdoor furniture) , lifestyle and accessories, medical and health, office and accessories, outdoor and garden, packaging, service design, social impact design, sports, leisure and recreation, student design (including any physical or digital product, service, or experience created during undergraduate courses).
This year’s jury is chaired by Tim Allen, IDSA member and Vice President of Design at Airbnb. The diverse IDEA 2022 jury also includes top designers from Dolby Laboratories, Fjord and GE. HP, Medtronic, Radio Flyer, Above, Signify and more. The International Design Excellence Awards saw a record 2,081 submissions from 25 countries in 2021 (we’ve highlighted a few of our favorites below). The Awards Program is now entering its 42nd edition in 2022, and you can enter your product/design by visiting the IDEA website. This year, all IDEA winners will be honored at the IDEA & Gala Gala in Seattle, ahead of the International Design Conference 2022 (September 12-14).
Click here to visit the IDEA website and submit your design! The entry phase ends on March 21, 2022.
Xbox Adaptive Controller (Best in Show)
Designed primarily to meet the needs of gamers with limited mobility, the Xbox Adaptive Controller is a unified hub for devices that make games more accessible. It was built from the ground up through strong partnerships with The AbleGamers Charity, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, SpecialEffect, Warfighter Engaged, and many more community members. Inputs from these groups helped shape the design, functionality and packaging of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which can also be supplemented with external hardware such as switches, buttons, fixtures, and joysticks to create a customized control experience.
Eargo Neo Hearing Aid and Charger Case (Jury Prize and People’s Choice Award)
Dieter Rams’ principles of Good Design ring incredibly true with the Eargo Neo Hearing Aids, a pair of hearing aids that are so small, they do their job incredibly without screaming for attention or validation. The earbuds are comfortably placed inside each ear in such a way that they are practically invisible to the eye, elevating the lives of hard of hearing people in a way that allows them to live a normal life without any social stigma. The Eargo Neo has a sleeker look than previous generations, with corrosion-resistant steel charging connections for enhanced durability. Replaceable Flexi Palm tips are made of soft, medical-grade silicone and conform to users’ ear canals, providing improved comfort and audio performance. The rechargeable Neo has a full day’s charge and comes with a portable charger case that protects and charges the earphones when not in use.
Hyundai Ioniq 5
The 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the closest we’ve felt to driving an iPhone in a good way. It brings modern, distinctive, elegant design, innovation, ease of use, and appeal, things that Apple has convincingly mastered. What’s immediately obvious, this electric vehicle was built with great ambition, honest intent, and not out of compliance. The Ioniq 5 is built on Hyundai’s just-ready electric platform – called EGMP, or Global Electrical Modular System – and is the first of many upcoming pure electric vehicles. Building on a custom platform allows thinking to be reimagined right from the start.
Cognixion One AR Headphone
Cognixion One is the world’s first wearable speech generation device, combining brain-computer interface and augmented reality to enable communication for people with disabilities like never before. Three contextually aware predictive keyboard options, radial sentence generation tools, and a built-in AI assistant are all powered by 6 occipital electrodes and 4G motion, enabling convenient use and functionality for the wearer, who have provided a new and intuitive way to communicate with the world. Designed for quadriplegic users with communication disabilities, this technology is usable in any setting and in any environment.
Sustainable Faux Leather by TômTex (Student Gold Winner)
TômTex is a sustainable synthetic leather made with just two ingredients, and chances are, you’d never guess it! Made with only two biological ingredients, shell waste and coffee grounds, TômTex uses no tanning process or backing materials, providing an alternative to leatherette that may not be vegan, but is incredibly sustainable given that it uses only waste for its raw materials. “It’s a solution that brings about productive use of more than 9 million tons of waste coffee grounds produced globally each year and 6-8 million tons of shellfish waste generated by the food industry annually,” says Owen Tran of Parsons School of Design. . It also provides an alternative to the toxic tanning process, which is not only harmful to the environment but also dangerous to workers who use chemical tanning agents as well.
Elves – Shinola Camping Accessory Set
By dramatically upgrading your camping experience, Elves makes the outdoors as comfortable and fun as relaxing indoors. Camping accessories have a simple and practical design that limits the elegant look of the shinning, while still being energy efficient and has a minimal carbon footprint. At the heart of the design is an innovative solar-powered fireplace that emits heat energy without a flame. Perfect for cooking as well as for roasting marshmallows, the heater legs come with built-in lights to illuminate the camp site, giving you a familiar experience, but completely different and better!
Nybia Bay Moines Spa Shower
Designed in partnership with Moen Shower Design, the Nebia shower head works with water droplets less than one millimeter thick. Just like a 4K screen that has smaller and more clumpy pixels compared to a 720p screen, the Nebia shower head creates what the company calls a “HD” shower experience. Now this may be marketing rhetoric, but the showerhead definitely covers more area than a regular shower, especially with the circular shaped showerhead and shower wand, which bombard you with rain-like sprays of water not just from the top, but up to the front. This perfect flow of well-heated water is thanks to the specially designed nozzles inside the Nebia by Moen that do not act as flow regulators, but rather as a pressure regulator helping it deliver a consistent experience no matter what part of the world. in a.
PlayStation 5
Polarized as its organic, alien-inspired design, the incredible demand for the PlayStation 5 truly cements its reputation as the most popular gaming console of all time. The entire structure is designed to look as if it has been shaped by floating components, highlighting its slim profile. Inside, haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and 3D audio provide deeper immersion, while the power of a custom CPU, GPU, and SSD is harnessed to rewrite the rules of what the PlayStation 5 console can actually do. With out-of-this-world performance, it helps that your PS5 feels in another world too!
Click here to visit the IDEA website and submit your design! The entry phase ends on March 21, 2022.