International Design Awards 2008 - Winners Announced

The winners of the 2008 International Design Awards Land & Sea competition for sustainability were celebrated at a reception on Monday, May 21, bringing together an enthusiastic selection of the 30,000 attendees of this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair and the IDA jurors for a peek at fourteen of the world’s most innovative projects pushing the envelope of sustainable design.

“We were delighted with the work submitted for Land & Sea,” said Hossein Farmani, IDA’s Founder. “TODO Design and DAS Studio turned billboards into gardens. Central Saint Martin’s Jenny White created a lingerie line for Barney’s using fair trade, free range leather, pesticide-free silks, and water-based dyes. And Tucson’s Mary Bergtold-Mulcahy designed interiors line “Les Indiennes” with an Indian village to whom she exposed organic cotton and helped develop electricity-free production processes. It’s uplifting to see what is probably the future of world design in these stunningly beautiful projects.”

The event, which took place in Hell’s Kitchen at the minimalist lounge H.K., showcased the work in a stunning video loop projected on the walls of the location. The entries were judged by the following visionaries in design: University of Southern California Dean Qinyung Ma; House Beautiful Senior Style Director Newell Turner; Gwynne Pugh, AIA; Josh Rubin, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, cool hunting; John Dunnigan, Furniture Department Chair, RISD; Rido Busse, Chairman of the German Trade and Industry Board and professor at Ulm Design School in Germany; Melissa Stearry, member of the WWF’s Beyond Green Consumption think tank; and Laurence Ng, Editor, DesignTAXI.

Projects were based on the following criteria for sustainability and aesthetic appeal: low carbon impact, feasibility of production, realistic marketability over the long-term, and physical beauty.

Congratulations to the 2008 Land & Sea Competition Winners, as follows. To learn about these designers and view their work, visit the Land & Sea Winners’ Gallery at www.idesignawards.com.

Architecture, Land: Garden Spots, by Silva Ajemian, Jorge Prado and Stefanie Werner at TODO Design and DAS Studio, New York . Proposed in this conceptual rendering is a plan to turn green a ubiquitous unused urban surface: the back of billboards. This, in essence, creates hanging gardens out of these commercial spaces inorder to offset the carbon footprint of the passing vehicles.

Garden Spots

Architecture, Sea: Lillies, by Peter Richardson, ZM Architecture, Glasgow. The lillies are a conceptual integrated energy-generating system of lilly-shaped discs placed on rivers in order to harness the power of solar energy on a large scale.

Lillies

Interior, Land: Les Indiennes, by Mary Bergtold-Mulcahy, Tucson, Arizona, US . Mulcahy is a textile designer who works with artisans in South India with SKAL-certified organic cotton, all-natural dyes and wood block prints: helping the village & over 50 families. No electricity is used in the process.

Les Indiennes

Interior, Sea: Icehotel bedroom, by Daniel Rosenbaum at Rosenbaum Design, Sydney, Australia. Each year a group of international artists and designers are commissioned to design and build from ice Sweden’s Icehotel bedroom suites, luxury suites, a church, ice bar, lobby and reception, ice art exhibition space and an ice theatre that seats up to 300 people. At the end of winter the entire hotel melts away; an entirely new Icehotel is built each following year.

Icehotel Bedroom Suite 2006

Product, Land: SWIFT Rooftop Wind Energy, by David Anderson and Charlie Silverton of Renewable Devices, Edinburgh, UK. The SWIFT™ is the world’s first specifically rooftop wind turbine with patented technologies for unprecedented safe, efficient and near silent operation.

SWIFT Rooftop Wind Energy

Product, Sea: Frontrunner by Joey Ruiter, JRuiter + Studio, Grand Rapids, MI, US: Frontrunner is a futuristic look at recreational sea travel designed in a marine-friendly way.

Frontrunner

Graphics, Sea: Cahan Design Assocates of San Francisco, CA, US created the annual report for The Gap, outlining the corporation’s increasing devotion to fair trade and sustainable production practices.

Graphics, Land: Scott Abel of Definable Design, San Mateo, US, is an intern graphic designer at Pentagram in San Francisco and the designer of this thesis graphic study of current and alternative energy entitled “Connect, Discover, Respond: A worldwide quest for solutions to end environmental degradation and the transition to a new economy.”

Fashion, Land: Eloise Grey, of Elstead, UK, won for her progressive collection of ladies’ coats in organic tweed from the Isle of Mull. The fabrics support the continuity of knowledge of fine weaving and circle of life that organic practices sustain: embodying respect for the makers, the land, the art of weaving, tailoring and the process of trying and buying.

Fashion, Sea: Jenny White of Eco-Boudoir, London, UK, won for her collection of clothing that solely involves fair trade and sustainable materials and production processes. For example, she uses vegetable tanned leather as a bi-product of a free range goat and deer farm in Germany.

Architecture, Sea, Student: London’s Sabba Khan, won for his design of a coastal building to function as an Oyster Garden: a place where the harvesting and cultivating of oysters is regulated and monitored. The shell-like structure sits on the sea bed, while the spaces within fluctuate and respond to the tidal patterns of the river.

Oyster-growing Garden

Graphics, Land, Student: Vincent Lo, San Francisco, CA, US, created a campaign to unify the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive standards for the manufacture of electrical and electronic equipment, restricting the use of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls, and polybrominated diphenyls.

IDA’s mission is to draw attention to the iconoclasm of designers worldwide conceptualizing and producing smart solutions to design problems. It is rare and multidisciplinary by design: we strive to align designers internationally with cross-disciplinary inspiration and dialogue. Before the iDA, founder Hossein Farmani established the Lucie Awards for Photography, which has emerged as one of the world’s most prestigious photography awards.

The earlybird deadline for entry in the 2008 International Design Awards is June 16, 2008. To enter, designers should visit www.idesignawards.com.