Red Dot Product Design Winners Announced

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The biggest Red Dot jury of all time has assessed 4,662 products and announced just 58 “Red Dot: Best of the Best” winners!

The most sought-after and internationally acclaimed Red Dot Awards that stand for aesthetic forms, well thought-out innovations and ground-breaking trends have announced the “Red Dot Award: Product Design 2013”. The “Red Dot” for excellent product design has been awarded to a total of 1,065 products with “honourable mention” for notable and especially refined detail solutions to 205 products. In addition, 58 products have won the “Red Dot: Best of the Best”, the highest award in the competition. Only 1.2% of all entries were considered worthy of this prize in 2013. 71.5% of the products entered did not receive an award.  

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Thousands of designers, manufacturers and architects from all over the world enter the competition year after year to measure themselves against the best names in their industry.

This year’s awards have taken the cake, as for the first time since the inception of the awards in 1950s, 1,865 designers, architects and companies from 54 countries submitted their current designs in the 19 different categories of Product Design, from fashion and accessories to construction projects and vehicles, electronics and furniture, covering the entire range of contemporary product design and architecture. As always, there was no pre-selection, with each individual object examined live and on site.

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In response to the record number of entries, more jury members than ever before had to be recruited for the judging process. In addition to established Red Dot jury experts like Hideshi Hamaguchi (Japan/USA), Prof. Stefan Diez (Germany) and Vivian Wai-kwan Cheng (Hong Kong), the 2013 jury also included other design gurus, who were involved for the first time. Some of the new jury members included shoe icon Dato’ Professor Jimmy Choo (Malaysia) and the French design professional Vincent Creance. In all, there were 37 experts from 24 countries – all of whom are independent, qualified designers, university professors or specialist journalists.

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The judging process as always was based on different assessment criteria, such as functionality, degree of innovation, or symbolic and emotional content. These criteria provide a guidance framework for the jury members, who then make their individual contribution based on their background and experience. Thus they quite consciously take the special intercultural aspects of design into account in their evaluation.  

The success of the award-winning designers and companies will be duly celebrated at the glamorous awards ceremony to be held on 1 July 2013, with more than 1,200 international guests from the worlds of design, business, politics and media in the Aalto Theatre in Essen. The Red Dot design museum in Essen will present all of the award-winning products from 2 to 28 July in the special exhibition thereafter.

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www.red-dot.de/pd  

Text & Photography: courtesy Red Dot Team