Tag Archives: Golden Pin Design Award

This magnetic ink watch makes the journey of time much more visually interesting

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The idea of a watch has always been to deliver the time to you in a quick manner so you can go about your day. The usual interaction is just to glance at your watch and get on with business, but the INK-MAGNETIC watch takes a much more different approach. Rather than telling you the time so you can rush to complete your tasks or get the day over with, the Ink-Magnetic watch captivates you and helps you appreciate the seconds and minutes rolling by.

The watch makes use of a ferrofluid chamber in its face, while magnetic hands manipulate the liquid from behind the scenes, creating a dynamic Rorschach-test-inspired piece of art that also happens to tell the time. In doing so, the Ink-Magnetic watch hopes to get you to pause for a bit and reflect on the beauty of time, instead of rushing through your day and not appreciating it!

The INK-MAGNETIC Watch is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designer: Han Ye

Algorithms helped design the shape of this Japanese holiday retreat

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Designed for idyllic Hokkaido in Japan, the YEZO is a retreat that uses its dramatic landscape and an experimental design approach to create a sanctuary in nature. The YEZO’s overall design is a fusion of both aesthetics and algorithms, optimised for fabrication from one single mould to minimise ecological impact and reduce manufacturing cost and delivery time. It features a unique curved roof that not only creates a spacious interior, but even provides a channel for the central chimney while creating a small terrace/skylight in the process. The wooden roof shell structure, clad with regional black slate, consists of sustainable GluLam (glue-laminated) timber beams suspended from a central concrete chimney. “YEZO’s curved GluLam beams are carefully shaped to operate in pure tension throughout, resulting in weight and material reductions of 90% compared to straight beams”, say Kristof and Julien, the designers behind the award-winning retreat.

The YEZO Retreat is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Kristof Crolla & Julien Klisz

The ultimate productivity keyboard for creatives features a tablet surface and 28 shortcut keys

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Shortcut keys on the left, a tablet surface on the right, a jogdial on the top, and a stylus pen for precision. There’s a lot to love about the Huion Inspiron Keydial KD200, barring probably its tongue-tangling name. Designed to boost productivity for creatives, the KD200 keyboard (let’s call it that to maintain my sanity) has everything you need to get your work done. The massive 8.9 x 5.6-inch tablet surface comes with its stylus pen, allowing you to sketch freely as you would on a Wacom or an iPad, while as many as 30 keys on the left let you access shortcuts, navigate interfaces, and toggle programs. Moreover, a jogdial on the top left lets you choose between presets, control/calibrate filters and effects, and just boost your workflow in a way that uses both your hands intuitively without requiring a traditional keyboard or mouse. Hook the Bluetooth keyboard up and you’re suddenly a whole lot more productive, whether you’re sketching, editing, post-processing, or working on digital graphic projects. Besides, the KD200’s incredibly slim profile, combined with its 600g weight makes it incredibly easy to carry around in your laptop bag, allowing you to be productive and efficient wherever you are!

The Huion Inspiron Keydial KD200 is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designer: Shenzhen Huion Animation Technology

This portable kettle lets you brew and drink a single serving of tea wherever you are

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The Pocket Tea Set really challenges the notion of the way kettles look and function. Deviating from the standard practice of having a kettle-body, a spout, and a handle, the Pocket Tea Set abstracts the form while keeping the function intact. Designed to be small enough to carry around with you, the Pocket Tea Set serves you a single serving of freshly brewed tea with a unique form that makes it convenient and fun to brew tea on the go.

The Pocket Tea Set’s kettle comes with a revolved form, with a distinct rim around the sides, and with perforations running around it. The rim serves as a visual indication of where the kettle and the kettle’s cover meet, while its protruding shape means that it always remains cool to the touch, no matter how hot the contents of the kettle are. Perforations run all along the circumference of the rim, which means the Kettle can be held and used either which way, and all you need to do is grab it by the sides and tilt it over and the freshly brewed tea strains through, leaving the leaves behind. The tea set comes with two cups too, which nest inside the kettle when not in use, and a hard-shell case that fits all parts in, allowing you to carry a complete tea-brewing kit with you in the palm of your hand!

The Pocket Tea Set is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Tai-Ming Wei, Rong-Hui Lin, Bo-Kai Yang & Chun-Yu Wu

This tabletop clothes dryer uses vacuum dehydration technology to dry clothes in 15 minutes!

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Vacuum Dehydration Technology sounds so much more advanced than the current technology we have of basically spinning the heck out of clothes till they’re 90% dry…

Meet the Morus, a tiny, tabletop vacuum dryer that works with stunning efficiency to completely dry and de-wrinkle your clothes in mere minutes. Rather than relying on centrifugal force to dry your clothes, Morus uses a combination of heat and a vacuum to extract every drop of water from your clothes giving you perfectly dry garments you can immediately take out and wear! The technology is a little new-fangled, but to uncomplicate how it works – the Morus uses heat to turn water into vapor (not steam), and generates a vacuum to reduce the pressure to just below the vapor pressure of water (0.0313 atm). This basically accelerates the drying process, extracting every bit of water from your clothes so that they’re 100% dry when they come out. A spinning drum on the Morus ensures that every corner of the clothes you put in is exposed to the heat and the vacuum for the highest efficiency, and a reverse-tumble feature makes sure your clothes don’t get crumpled or wrinkled in the process. To top everything off, the Morus even UV sterilizes your clothes before giving them to you, so not only are they perfectly dry, they’re safe and disinfected too!

Morus gets a lot of things right, from its innovative technique, to its small size, and even energy footprint. The vacuum dehydration technology consumes 40% less energy than conventional dryers, while taking the same amount of time to dry clothes. This method of drying even protects clothes from shrinkage or damage and works exceptionally well with sensitive fabrics. Fitting everything into a small form factor, the Morus can sit right on top of your front-load washing machine, or anywhere in your laundry room, allowing you to quickly dry clothes immediately after washing them… so you can wear them once they’re done with the wash (I’ve always wanted to do that).

The Morus Tumble Dryer is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020

Designers: Roy Yan and Axe Yi (Morus Technology Co., Ltd.)

A school-desk that turns into a safety shelter during an earthquake

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You never really know what sort of curveballs the year 2020 can throw at you. I mean we’ve had forest fires, a pandemic, murder hornets, there was a massive fireball spotted in the sky in Japan yesterday… so a mindset of preparedness is really our best shot at this point.

In that very vein, the Life Triangle Desk gives children the instant shelter they need in the event of a natural disaster at school. The desk looks and functions like any writing desk, but in the event of a quake or tremor (or honestly, even an attack on a school in a war-torn area), the desk converts into a secure triangle-shaped shelter against falling debris or shrapnel. In the event of a calamity, the desk surface can be lifted up to unlock it, allowing it to slide down, creating a triangular space underneath. Given that triangles are a naturally stable shape, the desk helps protect children from any large falling items by deflecting them. The desk also helps rescue teams who will instinctively know to check underneath them for victims and survivors.

The Life Triangle Desk is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Rui Sun, Wen Zhang, Guan-Chen Zhang, Er-Xuan Liu & Yu-Chao Li

This modular low-cost flotation device uses recycled plastic bottles!

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The World Health Organization is spearheading efforts to help children in low-income areas learn how to swim, and the SAVIOUR concept attempts at creating highly-effective, low-cost training tools for children as they gradually pick up swimming. The Saviour is a modular system of interlocking tubes that help you create flotation devices. The tubes don’t float themselves, but rather, allow you to attach multiple plastic bottles around the rim to help the overall product stay afloat. You can either assemble the Saviour to form a U-shaped training apparatus, or join multiple pieces to close the U, turning it into an O-shaped device that children can use as a tube.

The Saviour is low-cost, and its individual modules can easily be 3D-printed based on demand. Moreover, it utilizes plastic bottles, helping recycle waste into something vastly more useful. If a plastic bottle gets damaged, it can easily be replaced with another one, allowing you to quickly upgrade/repair your training gear. Besides, the colorful bands on the Saviour help increase its visibility, allowing you to spot it floating on the water from a distance!

The Saviour Modular Swimming Set is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Chih-Shan Huang & Wan-Ju Wu

Drink from this bottle without tipping it over!

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Combining bottle and straw into a singular device, the Double Drink Bottle lets you easily sip water without needing to lift and tilt it. The bottle comes with a straw-like channel built right into its body, working a lot like a straw would. Potentially, this means being able to drink on moving vehicles without potentially dropping liquid on yourself, or better still, sipping water while driving, so you don’t need to obscure your vision by tilting the bottle upwards.

The bottle exists purely as a concept, at the moment. It’s difficult to imagine how it would be constructed if it were to be realized as a product. I imagine cleaning it may also pose some problems, but that isn’t something a little pre-development brainstorming can’t fix!

The Double Drink Bottle is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Run-Ze Zhang, Xin-Ru Liu & Hong-Bin Yu

A cactus that cuts paper!

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Taking inspiration from the iconic saguaro cactus, the Standing Scissors designed by Starley Leung is a fun little piece of stationery to own! The scissor sits unsuspectingly on your desk, docked into its cactus-stem base, while the cactus’s arms form the scissor’s finger-loops. Pull the scissor out and it doesn’t sacrifice functionality for the sake of aesthetics… it truly is a pretty useful pair of stationery-scissors, it just happens to be remarkably cute too! Plus the stand, which also acts as a nice sheath for the cutting-instrument, makes it perfect pair of safety scissors for children, creatives, and stationery-enthusiasts alike!

The Standing Scissors is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award and the iF Design Award for the year 2019.

Designer: Starley Leung

It’s so much easier to carry this portable hanger instead of a travel iron

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No one really carries hangers with them on the go. They’re meant for on-site use, not for traveling… so what do you do when you check into a hotel or a guest house and you need to hang your crisply ironed shirt somewhere, and there’s no hanger in site? You pull out one of Lingjie Zhu’s Travel Hangers! Designed to fold not at one, but at two points, the hanger collapses to an incredibly small size, making it perfect to stash in suitcases, so your shirts, coats, blazers, etc. don’t ever get wrinkled because you carelessly hung them on a hook behind the door.

The way the Travel Hanger folds is pretty nifty, because it essentially folds against the direction in which you’d hang your clothes, so there’s no way the hanger can ever collapse shut by accident while holding your clothes. The hanger integrates a hook into its design too, which hides inside its form when closed, so the hook doesn’t accidentally pierce or hook onto things in your bag when you’re travelling. Pretty nifty, I’d say.

The Travel Hanger is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2018.

Designer: Lingjie Zhu (Hangzhou Hotdesign)