The ExpoWanted Design Competition is the first to use Instagram as a Launchpad

It seems only natural that Instagram, a purely visual social network, would be the perfect ‘battleground’ of sorts for a design competition. ExpoWanted, a design competition organized by the minds behind the design blog DesignWanted, aims at helping use the ubiquity and leverage of Instagram as a social platform to launch and award products, individuals, and teams. ExpoWanted is accepting design submissions currently on their website, and aim at showcasing the work of 10 winners at the Milan Design Week in 2019.

Milan becomes the very mecca of design every year around the annually held Design Week. With visitors from all around the globe, and companies showcasing their very best work at locations all around the city, it’s perhaps one of the highest honors to have your work showcased at the same week and on the same platform as powerhouses like Kohler, Nendo, Samsung, etc. Ten winners of the ExpoWanted design competition will see their work showcased at the Tortona Design District in Milan, with a footfall of nearly 150,000 people, comprising designers, peers, clients, buyers, journalists, and enthusiasts. This will also be followed by an extensive communication campaign powered by DesignWanted.

The free-entry competition will be conducted online, with a star-studded jury panel of design leads from Ogilvy, Tatic Designstudio, Ventura Projects, and more. With a simple theme that reads “Products that impact on our everyday life”, the ExpoWanted jury panel will select 7 winners while the remaining 3 will be selected via Instagram, using the social network’s visual focus and global outreach to turn it into a launchpad for good design. Designs that cross the preliminary judging round will need to pay a judging fee, but are eligible for a 5% discount if you use YD’s coupon code: YDDW19

Head to the ExpoWanted website by clicking on the link below and submit your work for free. You just may stand to win a chance to showcase your projects at design’s biggest international event ever… the Milan Design Week! And you’ll also gain a healthy handful of Instagram followers too!

Important Information

Submission Deadline: 5th March 2019
Submission Details: Click Here
Submission Form: Click Here
YD’s Coupon Code: for 5% Discount: YDDW19

The SHAPL Design Contest Will Turn your Renders into Reality

SHAPL is providing industrial designers with the opportunity of a lifetime. The SHAPL Design Contest wants to take your concept designs and bring them into the real world, as real products that people can buy, own, and use!

The SHAPL Design Competition stems from a very different place when pitted against other design competitions. While most design competitions want to reward good design skills, SHAPL wants to bring them to life. The SHAPL Design Contest exists solely to give designers and their concept designs the boost they need to turn renders into reality. The process is simple. Upload your design, and it gets judged not just by a jury, but also by consumers who would love to own the product. Consumers vote for products they like, bringing the human-centric element into the competition, allowing the market to choose the most market-ready, market-worthy product… while the jury panel also help vet designs based on practicality, aesthetics, and overall appeal. Winners not only see their products turn into reality, but also get patents to their designs, and hefty cash prizes of up to $20,000. (With total cash prizes amounting to $100,000!)

Back after a successful first edition of the SHAPL Design Contest, entries for the 2nd SHAPL Design Contest are now open (and free) to everyone worldwide, whether you’re an enthusiast, student, professional, or studio. The contest is a great tool to freely gauge market interest in your concepts, and a wonderful way to launch your student projects, passion projects, or portfolio side-projects into the limelight. The design contest is open to any category of industrial/product design as long as your design can fit into a 900 cubic millimeter box (assembled or disassembled)… If you’ve been published on Yanko Design, take it from us, your designs stand an even stronger chance of being one of the 13 winners of the SHAPL Design Contest! Go ahead and participate (did we mention, it’s free)! Entries are open till the 20th of December 2018. Go give your renders the limelight and opportunity they deserve! Scroll down to check out some of the past winners!

Click Here to Upload Your Design to the 2nd SHAPL Design Contest! Hurry, submissions are open till the 20th of December 2018!

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Below: 2017-18 Winners

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01. Docking Dryer by Ko

Hair-dryers are usually massive ‘L’ shaped objects with bulky, wired designs that don’t embody sleekness from any angle. The Docking Dryer, however, does. With a swiveling handle, the dryer goes from being an L shaped mass to an I shaped mass that then docks into its wireless charging dock, turning into a slick, slim cylinder, making your bathroom counter or makeup table look less cluttered and more streamlined and beautiful!

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02. Terra by Patrick Krassnitzer, Ferdinand Aichriedler & Manuel Hess

The Terra forms an essential part of your house, much like the fire alarm. Designed to alert homeowners in the event of an earthquake (made for disaster-prone areas around the Pacific Ocean), the Terra uses audio and light to raise an alarm when it gets wind of an earthquake in the area or in neighboring areas. Rather than rely on the internet (which may get disrupted or overloaded), the Terra receives communication via radio waves, making it much more effective in alerting people when it gets news of an approaching tremor.

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03. Redline by Conreur

The Redline is part pollution mask, part emergency alert beacon. It straps to your face, filtering pollutants in the air so you have clean air to breathe as you make your exit or wait for rescue. It also comes with a red tab that activates the beacon when pulled. An LED ring around the mask lights up, blinking periodically to catch the eye of rescuers, while the beacon also beams out its GPS location to help people track you better. Quite a marvelous product to be brought to reality!

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04. The Present by Byeong Jae Ha, JaeHeum Lee, Chieun Jang, Jisu Kim

The term ‘testing positive’ can be pretty ambiguous as to most people, it isn’t a clear term. Besides, the same term could be used for something as life-threatening as a disease, or as life-affirming as pregnancy. So The Present helps make things easier to understand. Essentially a pregnancy test with a tiny detail included to make things clearer, The Present comes with a display window that shows a plus sign for a positive pregnancy, but what’s really pleasing is the ribbon-esque design detail on top of the window that makes the plus sign and the display window look like a gift or a present, which truly is a heart-warming metaphor for a baby!

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Click Here to Upload Your Design to the 2nd SHAPL Design Contest! Hurry, submissions are open till the 20th of December 2018!

YD’s Top 20 Designs from A’Design Awards over the years

You better bookmark this page, cuz it’s filled with all kinds of awesomeness! We present to you a handpicked selection of winners of the A’ Design Award over the years. Go ahead and scroll down to inspire yourself. Who knows, we may be featuring your work here real soon! The A’ Design Awards pride themselves in absolute diversity, which means there’s something in it for everybody. You’ve got categories like Furniture Design, Electronic Devices Design, Transportation Design, Medical Devices Design, Social Design, and Home Appliances Design, just to name just a few. We’re sure you’ve got a design project that fits in somewhere…if you do, head over to A’ Design’s webpage to drop in your preliminary registration. With A’ Design, you don’t just get awarded, you get applauded too… Even a registration will get you registered in the World Design Index, and an absolutely wicked Design Business Calculator to help you work out your design charges!

Anyhoo! Here are the absolute best of the best, curated for our YD family.

[ Save your Spot for this year’s A’Design Award ]

01. SPH Smart Prosthetic Hand by Young Jo In
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Prosthetics and electronics sure make an insane combo. Imagine having a computer INSIDE your palm instead of within it! And you know what, the fingers are optimized to work on capacitive touch screens. Nice!

02. EcoZip Rollercoaster zip line by Frederic Gallimard
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It takes a great deal of talent to be able to swing from tree to tree like Tarzan. Either that, or it takes the EcoZip, an in-forest zipline rollercoaster that uses trees to create the coaster’s path. You know what the best part is? This isn’t a concept! The first attraction using the EcoZip has already been opened to the public in New South Wales, Australia.

03. Hair and Hand Dryer in one by Jaewan Choi
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Combining products with the same function isn’t just economical. In most cases, it can set market trends too (Like an air purifier/conditioner). The Hair and Hand Dryer creates the ultimate washroom/dressing room appliance. Way to save energy and capture two unique markets with a single product!

04. Toss Multifunctional Laundry System by Toss Design Team
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What’s the point of storing your clothes in one place, but washing them in a completely different place? The Toss integrates the washer dryer unit into your closet system, so your clothes laundering as well as storage are integrated into one solution. Doesn’t it make so much sense?

05. DigiLock Smart Bike Lock by Tong Jin (TJ) Kim
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Biometric security is yet to become mainstream. It’s there on phones, but hasn’t permeated completely into all our security related products. The DigiLock brings that level of encryption to the bicycle lock. Eliminating the need for a separate key, the DigiLock is not just convenient, it’s super secure too!

06. Arrow Office Table for chief by Taras Horoduskyy
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I wonder if there’s a Wild Design category in the A’ Design Awards, because the Arrow Office Table certainly fits that bill! With its edgy, radical, and absolutely in-your-face design, the table is built around the character of the workplace head honcho. Show them who’s the boss!

07. FLOvers Floor Lamp by Denis Orlenok
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Marrying a tripod with a lighting device, the FLOvers Floor Lamp explores lamp design that’s more about being sculptural than functional. Three radially arrayed elements bound together create an environment light that one can interact with, either lighting up the floor, walls or ceiling. All of them with equal amounts of beauty!

08. y.O Zmart Chair by Rick Yestadt
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Another contender for the Wild Design category, the y.O Zmart is a rather wacky chair. Designed to look like two chairs were accidentally fused together, the chair’s design is actually carefully planned. It can be used in two different orientations, as a vertical chair as well as a recliner. Eccentric, smart design!

09. wooden ebike Science meets Sustainability by Matthias Broda, ace team
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Plywood is celebrated for its load-bearing strength rather than its beauty. The Wooden ebike however celebrates plywood using clever design that isn’t just sustainable in every sense of the word, it’s unusually pleasing to look at too! Wouldn’t you want this? I Wood!

10. Zenyth Hubless longboard by Nicholas Peril
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What do you say when a Designer actually designs a functionally superior product just by virtue of good design? Challenging long-board design just for the sake of creating a design exercise, the Zenyth Hubless longboard turned out to be quite the new-age, tradition-shaking longboard design!

11. Nextbit Robin Smartphone by Nextbit
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Why do phones upgrade their specs but never their storage? Even 32Gb doesn’t seem to cut it these days. The Nextbit Robin sets new standards by giving you unlimited cloud storage along with the phone. Store and recall as much data as you want on your phone! Plus, will you look at those yummy color schemes?!

12. Smarter Smart display USB adapter by inDare Design & Baseus Manufacture
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Chargers are such an afterthought. Smarter wants you to know that a USB adapter can be as amazing as the phone it’s built for. Designed with a screen that displays relevant charging information, the adapter’s design can even dock your phone on it. And with its svelte matte metallic finish, you’ll never use traditional out-of-the-box chargers ever again!

13. Bird Wearable input device by Prime.total product design
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When they said that technology would put the world at the tip of your finger one day, they weren’t wrong. The Bird wearable is a tiny unobtrusive remote input device that just wraps around your finger. Once worn, your finger becomes a haptic-controller for all your smart devices. Pair this with voice control, and you, my friend, have got JARVIS!

14. Pin Clock by AliReza Asadi
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There are just SO many ways to tell the time now. However, even in a saturated market, the Pin Clock manages to step aside as a fresh product that tells time in an elegant and novel way. Three hands have projectors on them that project hours, minutes, and seconds individually. However, these three hands also rotate, forming the time. So you don’t just have a textual representation of the time, the position of each text tells you the time too! Perfect for a guy like me who can then read the time without his spectacles!

15. Torsion Rocking chair by Natalie Musorina
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Designed as a wonder of physics and manufacturing and a tribute to Mobius, the Torsion chair is literally just one strip of plywood with knit seating in between. The shape of the chair has a two-fold purpose. It relies on torsion stress to create a sturdy chair, but more importantly (from a design perspective), it creates something beautiful, memorable, and iconic!

16. 3bee Bicycle Frame by Tamás Túri
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The 3bee bike frame kinda reminds me of the Tour de France logo. Its innovative shape encourages the forward-leaning sitting position, a feature found in all sporting bicycles. Plus, since it’s 3D printed, it can be tailor-made to suit your ergonomics or preferences.

17. Refugee Wearable Shelter by Dr Harriet Harriss & Graeme Brooker
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Fashion and Social Design meet with the Refugee Wearable Shelter, a jacket that quickly transforms into not just a sleeping bag, but also a tent when you need it. Needless to say, the jacket is rather snug, and becomes quite spacious when opened out. The design gets full marks for not just meeting midway between fashion and function, but being a highly fashionable and even more functional product!

18. PeeFence Flexible Urinal by PeeFence I/S
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Environmental art turned constructive solution, the PeeFence discourages using open expanses of land as your restroom. A simple poster curled inwards at the base, the art actually becomes a usable urinal! Talk about 3D Pee Graphiti!

19. A.F.A.-Powered Exo-Suit for Firefighter by Jiazhen (Ken) CHEN
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Tony Stark may be a superhero, but Firefighters are real life superheroes. A.F.A. (Advanced Firefighting Apparatus) is an exosuit designed to enhance the abilities of the firefighter as well as give them additional protection. Designed to allow humans to carry up to 90 kilos with absolute ease (and break down doors efficiently), the AFA is functional and no less charismatic than any Iron man suit!

20. KickTrix Soccer training system by LA Design
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With the KickTrix, you can literally bend it like Beckham! Designed to provide an indoor football training experience, the KickTrix helps one to sharpen and hone their ball control skills indoors. That too without breaking anything around the house!

Impressed? Inspired? Well then, go ahead and save your spot for this year’s A’ Design Award!