NEW YORK, July 19 /PRNewswire/ -- The Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet, Herman Miller's LEAF lamp, and the Tesla Roadster were among this year's winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards. The awards, sponsored by BusinessWeek, are presented by the Industrial Designers Society of America.
The evolution of design from a narrow focus on aesthetics into a richer discipline that embraces branding, services, sustainability, medicine-even the comfort and safety of pilots and passengers-is on clear display in the 2007 IDEA awards. What had once been the preserve of engineers, business consultants, ecologists, and brand managers now falls within the growing purview of designers. Reflecting this expansion of the role and definition of design, the 2007 contest has been renamed from "Industrial Design" to "International Design."
Winners from 20 countries took gold, silver, and bronze prizes for service innovation in banking, mapping the interface between pilots and cockpit instruments, creating broad corporate and brand strategies, bolstering sustainability via electric cars, and remaking hammers and wrenches in new, better forms. So dynamic is the field that it is attracting a new crop of talented people. The student work, in particular, was startlingly good in 2007, with students taking a record 10 of 81 prizes.
The largest category of winners by far, some 13 of the 81, had an eco- design focus. The Tesla Roadster electric car took the gold with an exciting shape by the Lotus Design Studio in Britain and an all-electric plug-in engine. The Tesla is the un-Prius: a hot, fast sports car that's also green. Herman Miller and fuse project won a silver in design strategy for the LEAF lamp, which uses LED lighting to save energy. A hydrogen-fueled toy car, by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies in Shanghai, took a silver.
The one product that won the most awards-two gold ideas and one silver plus one Catalyst honorable mention-was the Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet by IDEO and Eclipse Aviation. The Eclipse jet won in IDEA's research, interaction design, and transportation categories.
Featured winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards appear in the July 30th issue of BusinessWeek (on newsstands Monday, July 23rd). The complete list of winners, plus a searchable, sortable slide show and in-depth case studies, is available on BusinessWeek.com at http://www.businessweek.com/go/07/IDEA.
The top winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards are:
Design Firms Awards
Gold Silver Bronze Total
IDEO 4 1 2 7
Formation Design 1 2 3
Group
Smart Design 2 1 3
Arnell Group 1 1 2
fuseproject 1 1 2
Insight PD 1 1 2
Pentagram 1 1 2
Whipsaw 2 2
Corporations Awards
Gold Silver Bronze Total
Eclipse Aviation 2 1 3
Belkin 2 2
Stanley Works 1 1 2
Timberland 2 2
