Design Lab jury shares a passion for design and technology
Electrolux, a leading household appliance innovator, has named four internationally-recognized experts to its Design Lab jury. They include fuseproject founder Yves Béhar, Axis FormLAB Design Director Jiao Mo, Senior Design Manager for Nokia Younghee Jung, and Sr VP of Global Design at Electrolux Henrik Otto. They will choose the winner of the Electrolux Design Lab 08, the sixth edition of this annual global design competition.
Jury bios
Yves Béhar, the founder of the San Francisco design studio fuseproject and designer of the One Laptop Per Child project. Béhar works in areas as diverse as technology, furniture, sports, lifestyle and fashion for clients such as BMW MINI, Target, Nike, Sony, Microsoft, Herman Miller, J&J, Aliph Jawbone, and Alessi. Béhar was named one of TIME magazine’s 25 visionaries for 2007 and one of Creativity magazine’s Creativity 50 for 2008. He is also a recipient of the prestigious National Design Award for industrial design, awarded by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum. His work has also received awards from IDEA/BusinessWeek, Red Dot, ID Magazine, D&AD and If Industrie Hanover, and his work can be found in the permanent collection of the Musee National D’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou, NY MOMA, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the SFMOMA, the Munich Museum of Applied Arts and the Chicago Art Institute as well as in private collections. Before founding fuseproject in 1999, Béhar was design leader at frogdesign and Lunar design in Silicon Valley, developing product identities with clients such as Apple computers, Hewlett Packard and Silicon Graphics. www.fuseproject.com
Jiao Mo, founding partner and design director of Axis FormLAB, a furniture and interior design practice with offices in Asia and the United States. She is also a lecturer in the Art Design Department at Tongji University in Shanghai, China, and the curator of International Universities Students’ Exhibition of Shanghai Biennale in 2006 and 2008. Mo says that her most satisfying moments in design have been the successful melding of traditional shapes or materials into a thought or touch-provoking experience. “Ultimately, when well done, furniture becomes art,” she says. www.axisformlab.com
Younghee Jung, a senior design manager for Nokia, who is based at the Nokia Design Studio in London. Jung was one of the key incubators behind the products like Nokia Lifeblog and Nokia Sensor, which build on predictions of how mobile phones will be the true personal digital tool that is beyond voice calls and text messaging. She says that the Internet adds another layer of depth in people’s lives, one which is digital. “As we always have to understand people’s existing behavior in order to propose anything for the future, it is impossible to do anything which does not involve understanding people’s behavior online.” Her digital home is at www.younghee.com
Henrik Otto, Senior Vice President of Global Design at Electrolux, heads up an organization of more than 140 designers worldwide. He oversees and directs the design process for more than 30 product lines in the kitchen, floor care and professional categories. With a consumer-centric focus, design is an integral part of the business strategy. The design department’s role is to make products that are emotionally appealing, innovative, bold, and exciting. “Today, it’s not purely about price and performance,” he says. “It’s about the satisfaction people get out of the products. They want their personalities to be reflected by their appliances and they also want energy-efficient appliances that are good for the environment.” Since joining Electrolux in 2004, the Group has received more than 100 prestigious design awards including IF and Red Dot in Europe alone. And Electrolux is opening a new design and innovation center in Singapore this year which will be the new regional design headquarters for major appliances Asia Pacific. Otto frequently lectures at universities, participates in design panels, and is an advisory board member to several international design companies. Before joining Electrolux he was vice president of design for Volvo Car Corporation. See Electrolux products at www.electrolux.com
iGeneration theme
More than 600 design students from 49 countries entered the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition. This year, undergraduate and graduate industrial design students were invited to create appliance concepts for the Internet generation.
The competition targets the upper-age segment of the iGeneration (25-35) comprising brand-conscious, busy young professionals who are independent and concerned about the environment, and whose lives are intertwined with technology and online social networks. Contestants were asked to submit designs for appliances for 2-3 years in the future and address food storage, cooking, and/or washing.
This year’s finalists
The jurors will choose a winner from among nine finalists based on the proposed concepts’ design and innovation, while taking functional, aesthetic and emotional aspects into account.
The nine finalists are:
• Sook: the social networking recipe generator with electronic tongue, by Adam Brodowski, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA.
• Coox: the rollaway cooking table, by Antoine Lebrun, L’Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique, France.
• E-bag: the kinetic energy-powered cooler bag, by Apore Puspoki, Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Budapest, Hungary.
• Stratosphere: the sanitizing clothes rack/valet, by Atilla Safrany, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Hungary.
• iBasket: the Wi-Fi-connected clothes hamper and washing machine.Guopeng Liang, Tongji University, China.
• Vesta: the foldaway cooktop with RFID scanner, by Matthias Pinkert: HTW Dresden (FH) University of Applied Sciences, Germany.
• Drawer Kitchen: The desk-drawer hotplate and fridge, by Nojae Park, Chiba University, Japan.
• Flatshare: the modular fridge solution for shared living spaces, by Stefan Buchberger, Vienna University of Applied Arts Austria.
• Scan Toaster: the USB toaster that prints news, weather and snapshots onto slices of toast, by Sung Bae Chang, Sejong University, South Korea.
“We received daring ideas and solutions that reflect the iGeneration’s core interests and concerns like mobility, convenience, time, materials, personalization, entertaining, technology, and sustainability,” says Henrik Otto of Electrolux, who led the selection of the finalists.
October finals in Zurich
The nine finalists have been invited to participate in the final event October 9 in Zurich, where the jury will review the finalist entries and select a winner. The Design Lab 2008 has a First Prize of 5,000 Euro and a six-month internship at one of the Electrolux global design centers. The second prize is 3,000 Euro and third prize 2,000 Euro.
Electrolux Design Lab has led directly to jobs and business opportunities in the design field for many of the contestants over the years. For example, three finalists are currently employed in one of Electrolux’ Global Design centers. Others have gone on to found successful design businesses of their own.
About Design Lab
The first edition in 2003 was in direct cooperation with three design schools in Europe. Since then Electrolux has developed the project to a global scale, opening it up to design students from schools around the world. The competition is currently on its sixth consecutive edition and has held the finals in Paris (’07), Barcelona (’06), Stockholm (’05), New York (’04), and Budapest (’03). This year’s competition is being hosted in Zurich.
Last year’s competition, “Green designs for 2020” was won by Levente Szabó from Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design, Hungary, with E-wash, a compact washing machine that uses soap nuts instead of detergent.
More information: www.ElectroluxDesignLab.com/press
Media Hotline, +46 8 657 65 07, designlab@electrolux.se.
