Today’s design concepts are tomorrow’s great products. The Red Dot Award: Design Concept was founded in 2005 as a platform to recognise and celebrate the best of design concepts and innovations. Believing that a design concept must be evaluated without prejudice, the award makes no distinction between entries submitted by students and professionals.

 All entries are presented to the award’s esteemed jury anonymously, sans names or corporate identifiers. Today, the Red Dot Award: Design Concept is the world’s largest competition for design concepts and prototypes.

Last year, the award recognised 340 design concepts across 30 categories. There are four distinctions bestowed upon the best design concepts – Honourable Mention, Red Dot, Red Dot: Best of the Best (the award reserved for the best concepts in a category), and Red Dot: Luminary (the award’s highest accolade given to the best of Red Dot: Best of the Best laureates).

 The award crowned the Google Self-Driving Car (now renamed as Waymo) as its 2016 Red Dot: Luminary. Driving itself with the push of a button, the car perceives the world through a network of sensors and cameras distributed on its exteriors and it does away with all the functions needed by a conventional driver. Other Luminary nominees were ILY-I, an intelligent armchair by Aisin Seiki and Studio I.T.O;  PAPIER – MACHINE, a book that comes with 12 electronic toys made out of paper by ENSCI – Les Ateliers; and F 015 Luxury in Motion, a smart research car by Mercedes-Benz.

Singapore took home two Red Dots for FIK Light (a redesign of the traffic light that incorporates an innovative visual countdown timer by Edmund Liew) and Swash (a portable washing machine unit by Ronald Tan), and two Honourable Mentions for Living Shelter (a flat-pack dwelling for disaster relief in tropical climates by studio WY-TO and POD Structures); and Pipérine and Crystalline (a set of innovative by Jonathan Saphiro Salim of LASALLE College of the Arts).

A panel of 20 international design practitioners and academic will judge the submissions this year. The cultural diversity of these experts will provide fair and balanced judgements that reflect the global industry standard.

 Submission period for the Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2017 close next Wednesday, 24 May 2017 with the awards ceremony planned for 5 October 2017 in Singapore. Winning concepts will be displayed in the museum and online at Red Dot’s website from 6 October 2017 onwards.

 Visit red-dot.sg for more information.