The VELUX Group Launches the VELUX International Design Award
Award spurs students to explore the theme “Innovation by Experiments.”
The VELUX Group recently launched the VELUX International Design Award aimed at spotting tomorrow’s trends and talents and discovering new, inventive blinds for the roof window.
What does the blind of the future look like? This is one of the challenges the new design award poses to students of design. The award spurs students to explore the theme “Innovation by Experiments” and to invent the future blind for roof windows. It is based on the wish to discover the best and most innovative blinds of the future and rethink current perceptions.
The design of roof window coverings (be it sun screening, shades, curtains or blinds) empowers designers to change the indoor environment by softening the brightest sunlight and managing day and night however the inhabitant wishes.
Window coverings provide the opportunity to interact with surroundings, and either connect or separate our immediate environment from the outside world. The design award therefore rewards solutions with the potential to make a real difference in the quality of people’s lives.
Design students from more than 20 European countries are invited to participate in the design award which is to be presented in May 2014. Entries will be reviewed by a jury of internationally renowned designers: the initiator of the Red Dot Award Professor Dr. Peter Zec,the Dutch textile designer Petra Blaisse, and Italian-Danish furniture design duo Gamfratesi.
Nominees for the design award are selected based on four evaluation criteria: innovation, quality of life, sustainability and market potential.
The first prize winner will be awarded 6,000 Euros at an award ceremony in May 2014. The winner of the second prize will be awarded 2,500 Euros, and all design proposals will be featured in a web exhibition. Contestants for the design award will have the opportunity to share their ideas in a social media community where everyone can vote for their favorite. The winner receives a prize of 1,500 Euros.
Kent Holm, Director of Decoration and Sun screening Products, the VELUX Group, says: “Many design students will be among tomorrow’s trendsetters. Our aim is to find the most gifted and maybe give one designer a chance to influence the future of the blinds industry. The design award is an alternative way of working with innovation and product development and we are very excited to see what’s moving in the minds of the creative young designers and to see what a blind also could look like.”
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