Design Plus Award

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Design Plus Award is an award for product design that was presented annually from 1983 to 2017 to the winners of an expert jury competition as part of the annual international spring consumer goods fair Ambiente of Messe Frankfurt in Frankfurt am Main . Since 1991 the award has also been advertised at the International Sanitary and Heating Fair (ISH) and since 2002 at the international trade fair for lighting and building automation, Light + Building .

Host

The competition is organized by the Form und Leben initiative, sponsored by Messe Frankfurt together with the German Design Council and the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry .

Modalities

The manufacturer / designer of the winning product receives a certificate and is allowed to advertise it with the Design Plus logo . The judged goods will be presented at a special show during the respective fair. Alongside the German Design Award , the red dot design award and the iF Design Award, Design Plus is one of the most prestigious awards of this kind in Germany. The participation, documentation and presentation costs are significantly lower with Design Plus than with the aforementioned design awards, but participation is usually only possible for exhibitors with goods newly presented at the respective fair, whose market launch must not be more than two years before the start of the fair .

Goal setting

At the initiative of the Design Plus initiator and long-time jury member Michael Peters, Design Plus was also used to promote young talent as part of various measures to support and expand the importance of design for the Frankfurt consumer goods fairs. In addition to the opportunity to participate free of charge in the competition organized by Gestalten between 1990 and 1994 with a special show of experiments by the Impulse Design Promotion , the trade fair also offered young artists and young designers a free Design Plus prototype competition. The synergy of these initiatives was primarily aimed at provoking, sharpening and expanding the commercial point of view of manufacturers and retailers on questions of product aesthetics . In the sense of this expanded understanding of design, expressed not least by the “plus” in the title, even in the regular competitive segment , in addition to classic consumer goods design, decidedly consumption and design-critical works of art such as the deconstructive multiples “Shaved Persian” by Christian Borngräber and “ Consumer's Rest Lounge Chair ”by Stiletto or the readymade “ otto chair ”by Werner Aisslinger .

In the advertising language of the founding year 1983, the goal-setting credo of the initiative sounded like this, according to its official declaration: "With the expansion of the classic criteria for exemplary design such as functional basic utility and aesthetic perfection through contemporary taste, sensual utility and innovative value, the tender aims to provide trend-setting impulses for trigger good design: tomorrow is today's design ”.

History and Development

Originally, Design Plus was intended for the Frankfurt Spring Fair as a counterpart to the long-standing Form award , which was awarded in parallel at the annual Frankfurt Autumn Consumer Goods Fair (later renamed Tendence ) until 2002 (although participation was completely free for the exhibitors).

Over the years Design Plus has also been expanded to include other trade fairs such as Light + Building . The fact that design today, in contrast to the post-war period in Europe, especially in the consumer segment is no longer funding to, but rather become thematic and dominant, meant that the two Frankfurt Consumer Shows by the shape and Design Plus as pure Design Award became obsolete . The concept of special judges and the promotion of young talent through subsidized special show formats such as the Talents , however, was continued. Both real and pseudo-altruistic aspects of ecology , ethics and sustainability now play a much more contemporary role in consumer goods marketing than design in and of itself. Especially since the almost inflationary increase in largely undoped design prizes, which are associated with disproportionately high participation costs, meanwhile make an unbiased quality statement of all these awards in the sense of utilitarian , aesthetic or ecological support for consumer decisions appear at least questionable.

Award winners

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
Prize is also awarded for other product groups. A few years and product names of relevant (i.e. particularly innovative or trend-setting) designers / artists / manufacturers / products should be added to the selections highlighted by way of example
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Ambience award winners (selection)

Prize winners ISH and Light + Building (selection)

  • 2002 (L + B): Stiletto Design Sales for Multiple "Light Club"
  • 2007 (ISH): Schüco for the design of a solar cooling machine

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German Design Council: Klaus Jürgen Maack - Design or the culture of the appropriate (published on the occasion of Klaus Jürgen Maack being awarded the Federal Prize for Promoters of Design), p. 132, Vieweg Verlag , Wiesbaden, 1993 online
  2. ↑ Birgit Richard: “Rien ne va plus? Design roulette: Is the design of the 90s based on new simplicity, neo-baroque or eco-design? ”In Impuls Design Förder und Messe Frankfurt [ed.]: Design Experiments 1991 - More or Less? , Pp. 14 - 23, Gestalten Verlag, Berlin, 1991 (text document online ( Memento from May 13, 2004 in the Internet Archive ))
  3. ↑ Quote from the official objective of the 1983 competition online ( Memento from January 10, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Statement by the Vice President of Ambiente, Nicolette Naumann, about the Design Plus special edition 2017 on the subject of "Ethical Style"; online at Möbelmarkt.de
  5. ↑ The award business - a criticism of the vague reason on descom.de online
  6. ↑ Design award review on Designtagebuch.de online
  7. ↑ Martin Schwarz: Designer has set trends with shape and color. December 5, 2015, accessed on September 30, 2019 (German).
  8. ↑ Description and illustration of “Light Club” online on Architonic.com