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.

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 :-)

I’ve received a note from a BraunPrize team member today about a recent email conversation with one of the visitors of the BraunPrize website.

In this email a design student raised some criticism about the (according to his view) low proportion of time invested into the judgment process in comparison to the (absolutely high!) number of submissions. And to be honest this first sight impression is more than understandable!

For sure a member of the BraunPrize team has been so kind to respond and explain some of the most important details around the judgment process and jury sessions to the student. After all I think some arguments from this conversation might be worth to share with you. Unfortunately the correspondence has been in German so the value of some snippets might be limited. However let me try to summarize the most important statements for you here:

• In total there are 2 Jury Sessions each of which lasts for 3 days. This makes a total of 6 full workdays!
• For each jury session the complete city hall of Kronberg (Braun’s Corporate Headquarter) is being reserved for the BraunPrize competition.
• For the duration of the jury sessions all stakeholders fully dedicate their time into the judgment procedure. Due to the location there is no quick chance neither for checking emails nor for any ad-hoc meetings with externals ;-)
• In case of any technical questions or concerns a team of engineers, health professionals and senior designers is instantly available for any consultations

Last but not least all invited jury members (present and past) are professionals in their domain and have worked several times in similar contexts. So your work/submission is in good hands!

Thanks to e.sens.e (the Media Agency which is responsible for the technical setup around this blog and the BraunPrize website among others) I’ve been able to share this well edited video below containing impressions from the jury sessions of the BraunPrize 2003. In the video you will see Anne Stenros, Alexander Manu, Rainer Silbernagel and Peter Schneider among others during and in between the jury sessions. Enjoy!

Link: sevenload.com

P.S.: Stay tuned as I will post some notes about the current Jury members of the BraunPrize 2007 soon. Furthermore I’m even more excited about the fact that I will join the jury at their first jury meeting in Kronberg on March, 14th – 15th.

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 ;-)