BraunPrizeBlog

While it seems that the BraunPrize 2007 has just been finished today I have the pleasure to share with you some details on the next and 17th iteration of the BraunPrize in 2009!

Attentive visitors of this blog and those of you who watched the videos of the BraunPrize jury 2007 members have understood that responsibility, ’socialness’ and sustainability have been some of the key dimensions for successful design.

Therefore I’m more than happy that the theme for the BraunPrize 2009 will be:

“Envision Conscious Design“

In March 2008 Braun is inviting Design students from across the globe to participate in the 17th BraunPrize. The only formal constraint in order to participate is that your examination must not be longer than 2 years ago!

In April 2008 Braun will send some thousand specification documents to Design Universities, Design Institutes and Design Agencies from across the globe. From there prospect participants will have the opportunity to submit their entries up to January 31st, 2009. As always participation is FREE and you will not be charged anything! As with the last three BraunPrize iterations you can also submit your entry via online upload!

While participation is free there is quite a few to be earned: The total prize award this time is Euro 36.000 of which the BraunPrize 2009 winner alone gets Euro 12.000 and a paid internship at the Braun Design department! The remaining finalists each get Euro 5.000 as well. In total I think that’s a tempting offer, right?

Finally what might also interest you is the composition of the BraunPrize 2009 jury members. Again Braun has been able to attract a small, but highly respected group of five jury members. Beside Peter Schneider, Director Corporate Design at Braun and Rainer Silbernagel, Director Engineering and Quality Institute Kronberg there are traditionally three external members as well. This time they come from Norway, Japan and Germany:

First there is Anna Kirah, Design Antropologist, Norway. Then we have Kazuo Tanaka, President of GK Design Group Inc., Tokyo, Japan on board. And last, but not least Braun continues to invite former BraunPrize winners. This time it’s Florian Seiffert, Professor for Product Design, Fachhochschule Mainz and first BraunPrize Winner of 1968.

After all I hope that I’ll be able to share impressions from the BraunPrize 2009 here on this blog as well. So stay tuned, download the according participation documents and keep in touch with us via BraunPrize Blog.

So this video drop-out took slightly longer than expected, but no worries I won’t bother you with any details here ;-) In any case: Thanks for your patience and understanding!

So as the title suggests: What is left to be said about the BraunPrize 2007? Well when you’ve been able to look behind the scenes of the BraunPrize as I’ve used to than for sure there is stuff for a lot of postings … On the other hand this blog has been our first experiment with this medium in this context so for this iteration of the BraunPrize I’d like to focus on sharing the most interesting basics in order to give you a good overall impression on the character and scope of such an event.

Therefore any report about the BraunPrize 2007 finale would be incomplete without sharing the final jury statements with you. It’s part of the BraunPrize tradition that the jurors give a short wrap-up speech about their overall impressions from being a member of the BraunPrize jury.

Accordingly I will finally present each of the 3 BraunPrize 2007 jury members here for you and finish this BraunPrize blog (at least for this iteration) with the keynote given by Peter Schneider, Head of Braun Design and chairman of the jury.

So, enjoy this last chapter of the BraunPrize 2007 finale!

It came to my notice recently that the hoster of our video files vpod.tv has experienced some problems while upgrading their hardware infrastructure ;-(

As a consequence of this it seems that the most recent videos I’ve uploaded do not seem to be restored yet. From their blog I understand that they are aware of this problem and seem to work on it. While this blog entry is from November 9th it seems that the problems seems to be more complex than they’ve anticipated. However from being able to play some video files I’ve uploaded this summer it seems that they restore videos from oldest to most recent.

So please be patient for some more days. If the situation remains like this for another week I’ll try to find another option for hosting and sharing the videos. Thanks for this and my sincere apologies for the inconvenience!

The 24 best design projects are shown at the BraunPrize model exhibition 2007 together with other highlights within a photo exhibiton:

• the 19 best entries to the national PremioBraun Mexico
• the 19 best entries to the national BraunPrize China

The next location will be published in the BraunPrize News in October. Did you visit our brand new BraunPrize online-exhibition-space ? - have a closer look here…

We will publish a couple of videos within the next days. Stay tuned. We start with the official BraunPrize-Video!

While digesting and preparing my own musing and report about the recent BraunPrize event last week you might want to read a report from my network colleague Arnold van Bezooyen who attended the event as well.

Among others Arnold also writes for Core77 the ‘design supersite’ ;-) where he published a short wrap-up plus some great photos. Arnold will also share some of his shots here on the blog soon. Thanks so far for this!

Core77 report to be found here >>>

Regular readers of Core77 the global “Industrial Design Supersite” might have already spotted the news about the joint competition of Braun and Core77.

For attentive readers of this blog all it takes to win a full sponsored trip to Germany is to answer 3 simple questions around the BraunPrize. Here’s a snippet from Core77’s entry form page on the terms and conditions:

“… In conjunction with Core 77, this year the BraunPrize is offering you the chance to attend the ceremony- including travel to and from Germany and a two night hotel stay- to see for yourself the wealth of talent on offer, as well as the chance to meet designers at Braun and tour Braun’s headquarters.

To enter the drawing, complete the form below and correctly answer the 3 multiple choice questions. On August 16, 2007 one lucky winner will be selected to receive an all-expense-paid trip to Germany and an invitation to the gala awards ceremony! Don’t wait - entries will be accepted through August 15 only!”

As I will be the moderator of the finalists’ presentations on September 12th wouldn’t it be great to meet face2face at the Braun headquarters? Or even better do a short live podcast interview!

Anyway: Good Luck and see you in September :-)

It sometimes takes relentless efforts in order to get what you want ;-) In this case my efforts to convince the three external members of the BraunPrize jury (Moni Wolf, Mark Breitenberg and Benjamin Holch) of staying for a short wrap up video were successful.

I was even more happy that all of them agreed since I’ve already bothered them with individual video interviews last time at the first jury session; you remember? This time I got them all in a body and in contrast to my usual approach of preparing interviews in advance this one was completely spontaneous which fortunately was not to the disadvantage of fun and insight.

However you should view/listen yourself what the three have to share. One issue where they unanimously agreed upon was that the degree of perfection the BraunPrize team under the lead of Gerlinde Kress has demonstrated was by far the best prepared event they’ve experienced.

For me this also results in a competition with equal opportunities since the right timing and form of presentation is essential when it comes to deem of more than 900 entries. Usually such works remains unrecognized for participants like you therefore I’m more than happy that it has been the jury who acknowledges these efforts and shares them with us.

Last but not least a personal note: For the next couple of weeks it will be summer vacation time for this blog as well. For sure you can leave your comments whenever you want or ask the BraunPrize team any questions directly by email at: info at braunprize dot com

I will be back in charge later in August and share some closer information during the weeks to come until the grand finale BraunPrize 2007 ceremony on September 12th. Have a nice summer and stay tuned!

Time passed so quickly ever since the first jury session back in March this year. Nevertheless I’m more than excited that I will meet the BraunPrize Jury again next week for the second and last ‘closed’ round of judging the final 68 entries from 17 nations.

In contrast to the last jury session which focused more on identifying the most promising ideas/concepts/designs from a total of 941 submissions this time the jury will be able to experience some sort of ‘look & feel’. All second stage finalists have been asked to send in their models/mockups/prototypes which will be displayed at the Kronberg town hall.

As last time Braun will install a web cam which lets you track what’s going on in real time at the jury session. For sure I’ll let you know when the web cam is online. Maybe I’ll also have the chance to make some photo shots (from a distance) of some of the models. I’ll check this out.

In any case I will also try to get Peter Schneider, Chairman of the BraunPrize Jury and Udo Milutzki, Vice President of Gillette/Braun engineering in front of my camera and conduct short interviews with them. Hopefully the other members of the jury will also join me for another short statement on their impressions as well.

Sooo … stay tuned for the second jury meeting taking place from June 11–13th, 2007. I will join the jury on late Tuesday evening and will spend the whole Wednesday with them. Realtime blogging guaranteed!

May I take the opportunity to re-publish a comment by leading BraunPrize Project Manager Gerlinde Kress which she’s just left here.

“After careful assessment the BraunPrize jury selected 68 entries out of the 941 submitted projects for the second round of judging.

All the BraunPrize participants who reached the next stage have already been informed and asked to send in their design model by May 31st, 2007.

Within the next few days all the others will also receive an e-mail with their result of the first jury session.

Please understand that we could not publish details of the results before the Award Ceremony in September.

In any case the BraunPrize team wishes all participants all the best in the future.”

This means: Check your mailboxes and we keep our fingers crossed that you belong to the lucky “second round” group!

In any case I hope this blog as well as the interviews with the jury members and all the information to remain will help you to understand better why your entry might have succeeded or failed. After all let’s keep connected via this blog and you might want to comment on any of the posting to come!

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