The Hungarian Design Awards and the Design Management Awards were Conferred on the Opening Day of the Budapest Design Week
The Budapest Design Week 2020 is held between 1 and 11 October with its programme built around this years motto: Join the Circle. As in previous years, the festival was kicked off with the Hungarian Design Awards and the Design Management Awards being conferred. The Hungarian Design Award, celebrating its 41st birthday this year, draws attention to the outstanding and innovative achievements of Hungarian design. The projects of the seven designers that were awarded in the Product, Concept, Visual Communication and Student categories and the winners of the special prizes were evaluated with quality of form, novelty, competitiveness, quality of implementation, user-friendliness and environmental consideration being at the forefront of the criteria.
The Design Management Award, founded by the Hungarian Design Council, recognises organisations that apply the toolkit of design management during the development of their business strategy, operation as well as the design of their products and services, while constantly striving to be innovative, produce outstanding quality and at the same time integrating the criteria of social responsibility and sustainability. This year the DMA went to the furniture brand Plydesign. During its six years of operation, the company, Plydesign Ltd, has grown into a professional, internationally recognised team distinguished by a solid production infrastructure, the integration of new technologies and innovation as well as respecting our cultural heritage. Besides the winner of the main prize, three other excellent Hungarian brands received a certificate of recognition.
Hungarian Design Award 2020
“Innovation is crucial for competitiveness in 2020 but the novel products or services must also have design at their core. If either of these two is missing, the given businesses will be at a disadvantage on the market, which they cannot afford these days. It is remarkable that it is already the seventeenth time that concentrated attention is being directed at design management during the Budapest Design Week and on the apropos of the award winners. We trust that this will lend impetus to a lot of businesses in the creative industry helping them during these challenging times,” stressed Gyula Pomázi, the president of the Hungarian Design council and the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office.
One of the main objectives of the recognition announced by the Ministry for Innovation and Technology is to make visible the strong business potential of the creative industry. “The Hungarian Design Award, looking back on a history of more than four decades, is the compass of innovation in the Hungarian creative industry not only for designers but for users too. The award-winning projects attracted the attention of both the domestic and the international arena and represent high design value. It is our priority to support knowledge in Hungary to enable it to boost the economy. The Hungarian Design Award helps designers to realise this by highlighting the best achievements of the design profession every year, while calling attention to the contribution of the creative industry to the economy,” noted Dr László György, state secretary for economic strategy and regulation.
Winners of the Hungarian Design Award and its special prizes in 2020
The Hungarian Design Award in the Product category was won by the ZigZag modular climbing wall designed by Tamás Erdélyi, Bernát Gara and Szabolcs Csepregi, the founders of Hard Body Hang; the elegant and ergonomical TILT chair, designed by Dániel Lakatos; and the Illan suspension lamp, designed by Zsuzsanna Horváth, who united environmentally conscious production and technological innovation in her work. The award in the Visual communication category went to the identity designed for the FIE fencing world championship in 2019 by Hunor Kátay, Sebestyén Németh and Szilárd Kovács upon the commission of the International Fencing Federation.
“I’m very happy to see that this year’s award-winning projects reflect how being a designer is not simply a profession or a job and is not only about satisfying various needs but is far more complex. It’s a way of thinking and an attitude, according to which a designers’ ambition is not to live up to expectations but to seek and explore, increasingly focusing on questions he or she proposes along the way. The designer doesn’t overwrite but rapidly expands his or her role,” said Hedvig Harmati DLA, the president of the Hungarian Design Award jury, a textile designer and the head of the Department of Textile Design at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest.
In the Concept category the award was shared by Ádám Nagy’s Birosign, which gives an additional function to László Bíró’s world famous invention, the ballpoint pen, thanks to a new technology, which looks at signatures as a sequence of digitised movements, and by János Szabolcs’s LavosBall, which is built on Leonardo’s coordinate system and referred to as a relative of Rubik’s Cube.
Among the projects submitted in the Student category, the award was won by Szabolcs Vatány’s Focus Ex, which is an extension helping users to read digital texts. The special prize offered by the State Secretariat for Culture of the Ministry of Human Capacities was given to András Kókai’s Aura adaptive sound system, which opens up a new dimension in listening to music. The special prize of the State Secretariat for higher Education, Innovation and Vocational Training of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology was awarded to Márton Kispál’s Frigo modular refrigerator, which is a food storage system with a cooling and a disinfecting function. The Hungarian Design Council’s special prize went to Ádám Miklós’ SLÉ plywood sledge evoking the world of Scandinavian design, while the special prize of the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office was won by the AXIS PRO measuring device used in the automotive industry, which was commissioned by Losonczi Innovation Ltd and designed by Remion Design Studio.
The winner of the Design Management Award and the recipients of the certificates of recognition in 2020
The Design Management Award was established eleven years ago to recognise businesses that take a comprehensive approach to design and innovation and see it as part of their business strategy from their visual identity through product development to operation and management processes.
This year’s winner of the Design Management Award is Plydesign, the furniture brand that won last year’s Hungarian Design Award and is present on the both the domestic and international market with its competitive, high quality and innovative products. Three companies were awarded a certificate of recognition: the WAMP Design Fair, which has been organising design fairs for almost fifteen years for Hungarian designers and their individual small-series products; YKRA, which designs sustainable bags and is committed to high quality materials and thoughtful implementation; and the Pécs Organ Manufactory Ltd, which is Hungary’s largest organ-building workshop with acclaim throughout Europe.
″During the evaluation of the projects the primary criterion was to look at to what degree and at what level the design management approach is integrated into the operation and innovation processes of the given organisation. This recognition is expressly aimed at raising awareness among those interested in the creative industry as well as the general public about the importance of the integrated application of design, while calling the attention of the economic sphere to the contribution of design and its value-creation capacity. Recent years have confirmed that design management can be a useful tool in all areas of the economy: included among the award winners were SMEs, non-profit institutions as well as companies specialising in design and trading business,” stated Dr Attila Simon, president of the Design Management Award jury, CEO of the Herend Porcelain Manufactory Plc. and a member of the Hungarian Design Council.
Budapest Design Week
“The motto of this year’s Budapest Design Week is Join the Circle, aimed at raising awareness about the importance and role of the circular economy. It’s worth addressing this subject in Hungary as the approach it represents has the ability to bring new, thus far unexplored markets to the attention of the domestic design scene. Besides embracing the values of zero waste and environmental-friendliness, circularity has the potential to increase the efficiency and competitive advantage of Hungarian businesses. We find it important to emphasise that the circular economy promotes a positive vision of the future and has the potential to create a competitive advantage for the stakeholders in the Hungarian designer scene. This year’s Budapest Design Week has a hybrid programme: a large proportion of the events can be streamed on the festival’s homepage, so we trust that design lovers will join from all over Hungary,” said Judit Osvárt, the professional leader of Budapest Design Week and a member of the Hungarian Design Council.
The online exhibition presenting the award-winners and the most outstanding projects can be viewed on the Budapest Design Week homepage. The patron and sponsor of the festival is the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office and it was organised by the Hungarian Design Council.