BraunPrizeBlog

I’m heading to Kronberg later today for the welcome dinner with the BraunPrize team as well as the 5 finalists!

So far I neither know their names nor their submissions or nationalities and you can trust me that I’m quite excited to meet them … OK, if I think carefully I have one submission in mind which I’ve spotted right from the start earlier in March 2007. Let’s see if the ‘gadget’ makes its way to the finale ;-)

What is different this year from previous BraunPrize forums is that I will be hosting a part of the ceremony. I actually feel quite honored by this as there will be some 200 design experts present from across the globe! My task will be to moderate the time slot where the 5 finalists will present their BraunPrize entries to the public. More on this ‘experience’ when the mission is fulfilled ;-)

Accordingly my schedule for the next two days will be quite tight and we’ll meet tonight at 19:00 hrs. for a briefing dinner with Peter Schneider, Gerlinde Kress, the jury members and the rest of the crowd.

I will spend tomorrow morning together with the finalists and we will discuss the strategies of their 10 minutes presentation. For sure we will do some fine tuning as well as a rehearsal on stage.

Around 15:00 hrs. most of the BraunPrize forum members will arrive and the ceremony starts around 15:30 hrs. with a keynote by Peter Schneider. Some more information is to be found here at the BraunPrize website.

Finally around 18:00 hrs. I think the winner of the BraunPrize 2007 will be announced and afterwards Braun/Gillette will host a great dinner at the Braun/Gillette Headquarter with lots of food, wine, beer and the likes ;-)

My plan is to conduct some short audio interviews with some interesting guests. More on this later on this week. For those of you who can not join us there will be the opportunity to follow parts of the event via the well known webcam to be found at the entry page of the BraunPrize.

Time up to the final BraunPrize forum to be held on September 12th is getting closer. Only some 3 weeks to go :-)

In the light of my previous posting I’m happy to share some information released by Core77 today. As you might know Braun in conjunction with Core77 has organized a small quiz where you’ve been asked to answer a short set of questions around the BraunPrize and its history.

So the lucky winner is Italian native Giuseppe Furcolo now living in Brooklyn, NYC. Giuseppe has won a sponsored 3 day trip to attend the BraunPrize ceremony here in Germany. I’m already looking forward to meeting him and maybe some of you the readers of this blog in a couple of weeks here in Germany!

Hopefully we can do a short audio interview to be released here on the blog afterwards. So, stay tuned!

It has been quiet for some days, but … for good reason ;-) We’ve wanted wanted to wait with disclosing news about the submission numbers until we have reliable numbers. So close before last weekend BraunPrize team leader Gerlinde Kress informed me that again for the BraunPrize 2007 we indeed have a new submission record:

After eliminating invalid entries (Murphy seems to be on board here as well) we have a total number of 903 entries from 54 countries across the globe which I find more than impressing. I’m pretty sure that the possibility to upload the complete materials digitally has added to this record once again (even though this feature has been offered for the last 2 competitions already). For a detailed distribution of the countries of origin simply download this PDF.

What I personally find most impressive is that this competition is truly international and not only focused on Europe solely. If I look at the Top 5 entries I see: Germany (172 submissions), Portugal (93), USA (70), China (60) and Mexico (57). Accordingly I hope that not only entries from countries will make into the next round, but also submissions from smaller (in terms of submissions ;-) countries like Chile (17), Argentina (14), India (14), Israel (14) and Sweden (14; the BraunPrize Winner 2005 came from Sweden!). Well let’s see …

For additional information in terms of dates, facts & numbers you might also explore the BraunPrize newsboard which is a mirror of the BraunPrize newsletter to which you can subscribe as well. As the BraunPrize truly is an international competition most formal information is published in 3 languages (German, English & Spanish) on the newsboard; this is service, right ;-)

Actually the next stage on the way to the final BraunPrize ceremony on September 12th 2007 is the first jury meeting which takes place on March 13-15th here in Kronberg, Germany. I’m really excited to join the jury in the course of this meeting as I will hopefully be able to have some personal conversations with the jury members as well and share some of their motivations and impressions here on the BraunPrizeBlog.

Last but not least in this context it might interest you that an additional jury member (the jury now comprises 5 people) has been announced recently. It’s Benjamin Holch, the winner of the BraunPrize 2003. Personally I find it a great idea to include a successful participant (Peter Schneider, head of BraunDesign has been a BraunPrize winner as well ;-) in the jury as he will surely be able to contribute his (not too outdated) experiences into the selection process.

Well last Wednesday (January 31st, 2007) has been a real busy day for the BranuPrize team as well as the for the BraunPrize Web-Server ;-) Finally the submission deadline for the BraunPrize 2007 has officially ended at 23:59 hrs!

So far we can’t share any actual submission numbers yet since we don’t have them either :-( As most of you might guess organizing and operationally managing a competition of the caliber of the BraunPrize is a quite challenging and complex task. Just to give you an example: Prior to practically ‘counting’ the submissions we first have to select any redundant contributions, filter the dummys as well as erasing any technical log errors before getting an idea about how many students out there actually have submitted their designs and ideas!

However what can be shared so far is that chances are that the BraunPrize 2007 will clearly exceed the level of the 2005 competition which achieved a total of 684 submissions. One factor which might have facilitated this number is that for each iteration more and more participants are making use of the digitally driven online submission feature.

In contrast now for the BraunPrize team the hard work has just started as printing out all the submissions and preprocessing them for the first jury meeting in March 2007. In the course of this non-public event of the BraunPrize competition we’ve planned some nice new communication features which we will share with you during the next couple of weeks.

As noted in the official BraunPrizeBlog announcement one of the ideas behind this blog is to make the competition more transparent for a broader public. Some portraits and interviews about & with the jury members are clearly among them … Stay curious :-)