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.

Some years a go I did an interview with the head of Braun Design, Peter Schneider about Braun, Design, the BraunPrize itself as well as the related challenges of globalization. If you’re interested you can download the PDF here. However beside the various topics we’ve touched in this interview it has been the title of the article which inspired me to write this posting: “Dream Real Products, Make Real Products”.

Back in 2001 when I was supposed to find a smart title for the interview/article I found that it reflected the quite nicely the purpose & direction of the BraunPrize: ‘Dream real products’. As many people might not know the BraunPrize is not intending to serve as an opportunity for Braun to gather new ideas for their product range! On the contrary: It’s an opportunity for design students & graduates to demonstrate their expertise, knowledge and creativity about design in general. Accordingly many nominations as well as winning designs from previous years are completely out of the range of products Braun is manufacturing these days.

When it comes to dream about design and imagine what ‘could’ be done I recalled a funny video I’ve found on YouTube a while ago. It has been released by General Motors back in 1956 and for sure it deals with Automobile Design. However it also shows some ideas and designs (for example what a future kitchen can do!) not available on the market at that time. Watch the video which is in many ways funny, naive, anachronistic, but also inspiring.

If you’d like to send us a link to similar resources on Design’s potential for inspiration via the comment function below. For simply commenting on it use the function as well. Or even better: Get creative and assemble your own video, upload it to YouTube and tag it with ‘BraunPrizeBlog’. If we like it we’ll give it a showcase here on the BraunPrizeBlog ;-)