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Celebrating Huaren Design

The winners of the Golden Pin Design Award 2016 will be announced in early December, paying tribute to the finest products and concepts designed with Chinese-speaking communities in mind. As the ceremony draws nearer, we preview some of the year’s impressive finalists.

Celebrating Huaren Design


BY

November 8th, 2016


Pictured above is Urchwing, one of the finalist products in the Golden Pin Design Award 2016

This year’s Golden Pin Design Award will wrap up in a matter of weeks, and the finalists for each category have been chosen from amongst the 465 Golden Pin Design Award 2016 Design Mark recipients, and the 45 Golden Pin Concept Design Award 2016 Design Mark recipients.

The Golden Pin Design Award is an annual award celebrating products and ideas conceived for huaren, or Chinese-speaking, communities. The award was set up 34 years ago, in 1981, and in 2014 it honed its focus to meet the needs of the world’s huaren consumers, which now account for at least 25 percent of global consumption. This year, the Taiwan Design Center, executive organisers for the event, received 3,005 entries for the Design Award, and 3,380 submissions for the Concept Design Award.

Golden Pin Design Award 2016
Final selections underway for the 2016 edition of the Golden Pin Design Award

The 66 finalists for the Golden Pin Design Award and 8 finalists for the Golden Pin Concept Design Award come from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, Macau and Switzerland, and they cover four categories; namely, Product Design, Spatial Design, Packaging Design and Visual Communication Design.

An eight-judge panel – which includes Nendo’s Oki Sato, who is Jury Chair, and Tony K. M. Chang, Regional Adviser for the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) – chose the finalists in two rigorous days of discussion. For the Design Award, they looked at whether the designs took into consideration widely accepted design precepts such as form-follows-function and ergonomics, as well as how they bring innovation to huaren consumers.

Golden Pin Design Award 2016
The 2016 judging panel, chaired by Oki Sato of Nendo

“I was expecting to see strange objects, but to be honest, I think that I felt this kind of [huaren] culture and heritage within every single detail,” said Sato of the high quality of this year’s entrants.

Among this year’s finalists for the Design Award is Taiwanese design studio Fuyue International Ltd’s Urchwing, a seating system that transforms from a baby seat into a high chair for kids, as well as a rocking chair for adults and a low stool. Other finalists include Chinese design firm His Design & Construction Co. Ltd., for their new headquarters, which were inspired by Suzhou’s traditional gardens. From Hong Kong comes finalist Marxu International Ltd, for its Saint John Tin Toy collection of robots and cars.

Image 3_The Building Which Can Tell Stories-His Design Creative Building by Suzhou His Design and Construction Co Ltd
The Building Which Can Tell Stories: His Design Creative Building by His Design & Construction Co. Ltd.

For the Concept Design Award, the eight finalist products include Mended by Taiwanese designer Eason Yang, and Judges of Internet by Taiwanese designers Fu Yi Hua, Hsu Kai Shiang and Ao Weng Si. The latter is an interactive book that addresses cyber bullying through the ‘Eighteen Levels of Hell’, while the former sees Yang use traditional Taiwanese methods for mending broken porcelain tableware in modern ways, creating contemporary vases with discarded metal.

Golden Pin Design Award
Marxu’s Saint John tin toy line

The winners of the Golden Pin Design Award 2016 will be announced at a ceremony on 1 December 2016, alongside a forum that will consider huaren design and what that means, and an exhibition of the winning entries.

Golden Pin Design Award
Goldenpin.org.tw

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