The home of architecture and design in Asia-Pacific
Get the latest design news direct to your inbox!
Get the latest design news direct to your inbox!
The results are in! From over 1000 entries across Asia, these 15 Gold Award winning projects are your DFA Design For Asia winners for 2019.
February 5th, 2020
The annual DFA Design For Asia Awards are a regular highlight of our region’s design calendar. Organised by the Hong Kong Design Centre with Create Hong Kong of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government as the lead sponsor, the 2019 awards show saw a staggering 1100+ entries vying for the coveted Gold and Grand awards – leaving no easy task for the judging panel.
Since launching in 2003, the Design For Asia Awards have offered a stage for designers of all levels to showcase their work, and for the Asian design community to honour and reward those most special of designers who earn the final awards. For these lucky winners, this is an opportunity to proudly display their designs to the world, and to establish networks with influential designers and business leaders across the region.
“We at Hong Kong Design Centre believe that design can improve quality of life, promote social innovation and preserve cultural heritage,” says Professor Eric Yim, Chairman of the HKDC “It makes the built environment a better place to live, work and play. The DFA Awards programme is one of the most prestigious and important awards in the design industry. We are delighted to see talents from across the region showcase their best work with an increase of 10% in DFAA submissions this year”
With the highest levels of submissions yet, let’s see which nine projects took home the Gold, and which six earned the special Grand Awards…
From Hong Kong design studio Pengguin comes this brilliant Rice Exhibition branding campaign. The logo features a stylized Chinese character for “rice.” Each stroke of the character looks like a long grain rice. Each grain of rice is plump and translucent, so for rice connoisseurs, it is a telltale sign of quality.
Japan’s Arata Takemoto Design designed the signage for CROSSLIGHT, built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Baiko Gakuin University. Designed to be complementary to each other, both logo and signage are composed of crossing lines. The logo and signage designs are a tribute to the light and cross motif of the university’s logo.
In artwork created for an exhibition titled Sea of the Heart where viewers are encouraged to respond to and consider life and death, Hong Kong’s Sixstation Workshop created this brilliant piece of branding. The typeface design takes the centre stage as the vehicle to represent the unrepresentable, namely, what death means to oneself and to society.
Japan’s SPREAD created the HARY Stuck-on Design to decorate walls, windows, and other surfaces without damaging them. Made of a mix of materials, the colourful tapes are easily applied and pulled off making them perfect for pop-up concepts or one-off events.
From Chinese design studio Atelier tao+c, the U-shaped room was once a part of the ballroom of a house built in the 1930s, featuring a full faceted bow window facing the back garden. Following years of neglect, Atelier tao+c renovated and updated the 42 square-metre room as a self-contained living unit, done with simple materials and finished with a small budget.
Lu+Architects’s project in Mainland China’s northern Zhenjiang province saw the repurposing of traditional granary rice barns. The exhibition halls welcome curators, artists, and thousands of visitors into Wuzhen, and are suitable for hosting a wide array of cultural or commercial events.
The Dutch design team at Philips Experience Design spared no expense with the design of the Philips S9000 Prestige electric shaver. Designed to look sophisticated and to deliver the best user experience, the shaver features wireless charging, motion sensors, precision detailing and aesthetics drawn from luxury watch and car design.
The iconic design aesthetics Apple brought an improved battery life and larger screen to the fourth-generation Apple Watch. In an advanced design that combines high tech hardware and software into a singular, unified lightweight unit, the 30% larger display seamlessly integrates into the thinner, smaller case, while the new interface offers more information with richer, more vivid details.
From HEREDIA KOMIYAMA in Japan comes the KiKiKi – a delightful novelty product that takes the form of a prism pencil sharpener. Under closer examination, KiKiKi reveals a blade to shave away a pencil-like stick of natural fragrant wood, satisfying the user in function, while offering a pleasant wooden odour.
Hong Kong’s UNStudio designed Raffles City was from the inside out to maximize accessibility, interaction, and efficiency, while minimizing carbon footprints and compartmentalization. The mixed-use miniature city within a major city allows a seamless flow from residences, workplaces, public transportation, and parking garages to its commercial and entertainment facilities.
Nan Fung Design in Hong Kong designed The Mills with a coherent, steel and glass construction and a contiguous modern design, resulting in a complex that showcases local design, fashion, textiles and art. The Mills is a financially self-sustaining social ecosystem for people of all generations, which has retained authentic heritage features, the original metal entrance gates and most of the outer shell and structure, as well as the staircases, preserved in their original condition.
The unique Cosmo Leap Sigma from Japane’s KONICA MINOLTA is an optical projector for mid-size, municipal planetariums, operated primarily for educational purposes. Designed to benefit all planetarium users, especially children, the device combines both star and planet projection in one, resulting in the smallest projector in its class worldwide, offering 80 constellation images.
Located in the Hangzhou old town, the Hong Shi Ban Farmer’s Market was revamped by way of space design and rebranding by 702design. To freshen up its tired image, the market’s visual identity and signage systems were redesigned to disrupt the linearity of written language. The resulting bilingual logo and signage contain Chinese characters and letters of the alphabet that are scattered along the edge or arranged in between one another to form an intriguing visual and semantic logic.
Japan’s Muji brand is one known for minimalism and comfort. And for the design team at Ryohin Keikaku, designing a Muji hotel would have to reflect this. Taking advantage of a former office space that features a high ceiling, the architects repurposed the floor using upcycled materials, such as century-old paving stones from nearby Tokyo tramways, as well as iron sheets from decommissioned ships, so the sense of space is connected with local history and culture through salvaging old objects and giving them second lives.
Gold and Grand Award with Special Mention – SILZENCE men/2019 SS/In Between Black and White
Taiwan’s SILZENCE style looked to the world of classic book design for their In Between Black and White men’s fashion collection. Drawing inspiration from the art of bookbinding, designer Chen Jun-Liang combined the elements of pleating, layering, opening up, and asymmetry to create this stunning men’s apparel collection. Made of sustainable satin materials, the simple yet elegant style continues SILZENCE trend-setting streak of Zen influenced Eastern aesthetics.
We raise a glass and congratulate all DFA Design for Asia Award winners for 2019. We can’t wait to see what 2020’s awards will bring!
A searchable and comprehensive guide for specifying leading products and their suppliers
Keep up to date with the latest and greatest from our industry BFF's!
The internet never sleeps! Here's the stuff you might have missed
