In its 38th year, the International Design Excellence Awards once again found the best design work of the past year. The esteemed IDEA jury, led by Whirlpool’s Sr. Design Manager Michael Kahwaji, IDSA, combed through over 840 finalists to select nearly 150 winning entries. This year IDEA saw a record number of more than 1,870 entries in the first round.
“The ones that were most exciting [to me] were the ones that were simple and obvious,” Kahwaji (left) said. “I like this idea of products that are subtractive designs—where they’re just taking everything away and whittling it down to the core. You’ll see that in the awards where the best projects were the ones that were sometimes the simplest.”
Since 2010, The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, has played host to second round jurors who spend four days testing products, evaluating entries and debating the principles of design excellence. The jurors deliberated on each entry base on the IDEA criteria: design innovation, user experience, benefit to client, benefit to society and appropriate aesthetics.
At the end of the four days and after countless hours of debate and deliberation, the IDEA jury walked away with a snapshot of the current design industry and a pool of winners they have awarded with pride.
Winners will be notified on June 1 and public announcements will first be made at the IDEA Ceremony & Gala on Wednesday, September 19 at the US Freedom Pavillion at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, the night before the inaugural International Design Conference opens. The Gala is sponsored by Samsung.