Given to an Asian team only the second time in the history of the Red Dot Awards, the Design Team of the Year 2006, was awarded last night to LG Electronics Corporate Design Center. The first Asian winner was Sony in 2000. Other winners have been adidas, Pininfarina, Nokia, Apple etc.
Coming close on the heels of Bruce Nussbaum's announcement on his blog yesterday that 26% of the IDSA/BusinessWeek IDEA awards this year have gone to Asia, a threefold increase over 2005, when only 8% of the winners coming from Asia, this looks like a healthy trend for the Asian design industry. Interesting to note that Singapore's Minister for the Arts travelled specially to Germany for the awards event. I've written about Singapore's forward looking national Design policy here before.
Exclusive interview with Dr. Peter Zec, President of the Red Dot Awards and current President of ICSID who was in San Francisco last week, after the jump."LG's commitment to product design as an integral part of their global corporate strategy was the key reason for our decision. I've been watching their performance for the last 15 years - from the beginning,they've understood the role design plays in building a global brand and this has been the essence of their management philosophy. In fact, their very first employee was an industrial designer.
We (at Red Dot) do not just look at the surface styling and flash when we select the "Design Team of the Year", we look at organization as a whole and also evaluate the commitment to design and the role it plays. The founders of LG Electronics have demonstrated this consistently throughout the company's history. We have high hopes for their future."
More on the how and why of their selection process on the Core77 Design Directory Business blog coming soon!
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