Tag Archives: Red Dot Awards: Design Concept

EV Manufacturer U POWER debuts a catalog of electric cars that use the same modular electric platform

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A majority of smartphones today use a handful of common parts. Most smartphones rely on Samsung for displays, on Sony for camera sensors, and on Qualcomm for chips. The only things that are really different are the outer aesthetic, some of the hardware, and the user experience. Now imagine if cars could do that too. An SUV, a minivan, a sedan, a pickup truck, all powered by the same electric platform. That’s pretty much what Chinese EV startup U POWER is envisioning with its UP Super Board. Designed to be an electrified chassis on which the car itself sits, the UP Super Board helps simplify the carmaking process, allowing EV makers to launch a diverse product portfolio in a shorter development cycle. The beauty of the UP Super Board is the fact that it’s car-agnostic too, supporting a variety of car types and sizes with only minor changes being made to the platform itself in terms of wheel size, ground clearance, and probably other performance aspects like torque, range, etc.

Designer: U Power

“The UP Super Board is a skateboard chassis that incorporates four leading technologies: chassis-by-wire, ring-network based EEA with pluggable design, CTC battery system and highly integrated thermal system,” says Paul Li, founder and CEO at U Power. “As a platform-based software and hardware-integrated operating system, UP Super Board enables automakers to focus more on styling, space and intelligent user experience and operation.”

To help further demonstrate the platform’s versatility, U Power also unveiled the UP Space Concept cars, a collection of automobiles that all use the UP Super Board platform underneath. The 5 car categories include a sedan, MPV, SUV, pick-up, and van, all of which sit on the same UP Super Board platform. All cars have the same wheelbase, but have chassis and track modifications based on the car type.

This entire process does to cars what standardized parts did for smartphones. Almost every smartphone runs on Android, but uses its own version/variation of it. As is the case with the processor, display, and camera modules. U Power’s standardized electric skateboard makes creating your own automobile easy too. Companies can build and modify concepts, experimenting with forms, aerodynamics, and interiors without having to focus on the underlying electrical and electronic components that actually power the EV. Moreover, they can make their own modifications to the platform too, getting the most out of it.

The UP Super Board and UP Space Concepts are winners of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

The Red Dot Awards: Design Concept is now accepting entries for its 2023 edition. Click here to participate or visit the Red Dot Awards website to learn more. Early Submission Phase ends on January 18th, 2023.

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Absolutely genius toilet design with a lid-activated flush only flushes when you’ve shut the lid

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Did you know that you’re supposed to close the lid each time you flush a toilet?! The lid isn’t there for aesthetic reasons, it’s there to make sure germs and bacteria don’t fly around into the air as particulate matter when you hit the flush. THAT’S what the lid is for! Well, I think I can speak on behalf of a lot of us but I was today-years-old when I got to know that… and sure, it sounds like a weirdly complicated procedure, but this award-winning toilet design makes the entire process easier. Dubbed ‘CLOSE THE LID’, this toilet’s clear lid IS its flush. The lid is directly connected to the toilet’s flushing system, activating it only when you shut the lid. The lid helps contain the water spray, preventing a ‘blowback’ of sorts, while its clear design lets you know if you.ve flushed successfully.

Designer: Yang Haojing

“The toilet lid employs a bicycle flywheel-like structure at the shaft to ensure that the flush is triggered when the lid is closed at a 45-degree angle—and only during the process of closing the lid, rather than continuously after the lid is closed”, says designer Yang Haojing. The cover of the lid is transparent, allowing you to check if the ‘payload has been delivered’ after a single flush. If you DO need to flush again, there’s a flush switch located on the lid too, letting you activate the flush again without lifting and closing the lid.

The CLOSE THE LID is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.

The Red Dot Awards: Design Concept is now accepting entries for its 2023 edition. Click here to participate or visit the Red Dot Awards website to learn more. Early Submission Phase ends on January 18th, 2023.

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All-natural sustainable washing machine uses river currents to to wash your clothes

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It doesn’t need extra water cycles, and it runs entirely without electricity. Meet the Bamboo Washing Machine, a cleverly low-tech appliance that washes your clothes efficiently with zero wastage and emissions. A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, the machine is made entirely from bamboo wood, and plugs right into a shallow riverbed, using river currents to turn the machine’s drum. The water flowing through the machine helps wash dirt off the clothes too, giving you an entirely automated device that runs entirely on its own, using the powers of nature and human ingenuity!

Designer: Dalian Minzu University along with Tangshan Shangjiu Industrial Design Center

“Bamboo Washing Machine is a simpler version of a traditional vortex or top-loading washing machine”, say the designers, students at the Dalian Minzu University in China. The analog machine was designed for rural communities to help automate a task and free up their time without needing the capital to buy a washing machine or requiring an electric grid to power it. There are two components to each machine, the outer body itself, which stays fixed in the ground, and the internal drum, which detaches and can be used as a basket to carry clothes from the home to the machine and back. Each family in the community possesses their own drum, which they use to carry the clothes around. Every part of the machine is made from bamboo, which is easy to grow, biodegradable, and can be repaired or replaced with zero plastic or metal waste (unlike your average washing machine). The machine can be used at any time of the day and all year round too, although water levels during the rain or drought may have an effect on usage.

The Bamboo Washing Machine is a Best Of Best Winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2020.

The Red Dot Awards: Design Concept is now accepting entries for its 2023 edition. Click here to participate or visit the Red Dot Awards website to learn more. Early Submission Phase ends on January 18th, 2023.

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‘Portable wind-farm’ with a folding design lets you harness renewable wind energy anywhere you go

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Because solar panels are yesterday’s news…

The beauty of wind is that it isn’t really tied to the time of day the way the sun is. You could easily generate wind energy at night as you could in the daytime. The only barrier so far has been the fact that setting up your own wind farm is ridiculously expensive and space-intensive. In comes Jackery’s AIR-W, a portable, lightweight wind energy generator with a folding design that allows it to be as compact and easy to carry as a set of solar panels. Crafted with a thermoplastic carbon-fiber composite body, the AIR-W is hyper-portable and stands at approximately 5 feet all. It sports two wind turbines stacked vertically, with folding blades that open out in the shape of a fan when needed, and a tripod-style base with built-in nails that let you firmly fix the AIR-W on any type of land or terrain. Set it up and you now have your own personal wind farm capable of generating up to 200W of output power, enough to juice your laptop, phone, wireless speaker, tablet, and drone together!

Designer: Shenzhen Hello Tech Energy Co. Ltd. for Jackery

The AIR-W is the most compact wind turbine for its power output, providing 200W in a package small enough to slide right under your arm when folded shut. The carbon-fiber composite gives the structure its signature lightness while also ensuring it’s just as tough and can take on everything from mild breezes to strong gusts of air. To prevent the AIR-W from tipping over or flying away, the tripod base has built-in nails that dig right into the surface of the ground, securing itself similar to how a tent would. It’s built to be waterproof too, with an IP67 rating that allows you to use it in even inclement weather to keep your home or campsite powered through the storm!

The Jackery AIR-W is a Best Of Best Winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

The Red Dot Awards: Design Concept is now accepting entries for its 2023 edition. Click here to participate or visit the Red Dot Awards website to learn more. Early Submission Phase ends on January 18th, 2023.

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This electric guitar accessory lets you wirelessly listen to your guitar through your TWS earbuds

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Bypassing the amplifier, effect pedal, and pretty much any other conceivable gear associated with electric guitars, the Jack is a tiny device that allows you to connect your electric guitar to other devices via Bluetooth. Touted as a ‘wireless guitar headphone amplifier’, all you have to do is plug Jack into your guitar and it suddenly interfaces with your phone as well as your TWS earbuds, allowing you to play directly into your own ear as you would with a pair of studio monitor headphones… except this hardware is entirely wireless, and compact enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Designer: Studio Elk

The Jack managed to secure a Red Dot Design Concept Award in 2020 for its clever and compact design. Most smartphones have the ability to process signals from an electric guitar, and the Jack relies on this to bypass the traditional massive amplifier that you see most electric guitars connected to. The Jack’s main piece of hardware is this unit that plugs into the 3/4th-inch audio socket of an electric guitar, basically powering it and sending the electrical signals to the smartphone to interpret.

The smartphone app is where all the magic happens, essentially. Signals from the Jack are sent to the phone, where an app decodes them, turning them into music. You can edit the signal by adding virtual amps and filters to modulate the sound, doing basically what actual gear would do, but instead through software. Finally, the end product plays either on your phone or through TWS earbuds that you place in your ear. This way, you can jam in your own head without having everyone around you listening in on your music (or your neighbors getting perturbed). The Jack’s entirely wireless design means you can just about jam anywhere you want, at home, in a cafe, on the subway, heck… even in an airplane. Your co-passengers may not appreciate having the guitar invading their personal space, though!

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Brilliant or bizarre? This travel case comes with its own detachable electric hoverboard

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Whether you want to ride around the cityside or have your luggage follow you around an airport without tugging away at it, the Trunk Car is a wild concept that has a little something for everyone.

Look at the image above and tell me you’re not shocked by its brilliance. A suitcase with a detachable hoverboard built into it instead of those crummy, small 360° wheels! Designed as a clever idea to make transport in general easy, the Trunk Car can either be used to move luggage around or to move you! The hard-shell travel case detaches from its wheel-and-handle platform to reveal what’s basically a hoverboard with handlebars. You can use this, for the most part, to ride around from one part of a neighborhood or campus to another, or when you’re traveling with luggage, just attach the hard shell onto the hoverboard and you now have a motorized travel-case that automatically moves in the direction you’re pulling it in, reducing the effort and allowing you to carry heavy items with relative ease!

The Trunk Car is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

Designer: The 36th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation

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Morphy Richards designed a crazy new type of electric oven with a flip-top design that turns it into a grill

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Is it an electric oven? A portable grill? How about both?! The Multifunctional Flip-top Electric Oven from Morphy Richards isn’t your conventional kitchen gadget. Sure, it looks and feels like your standard oven, but it has an upper hood that lifts open like a barbecue grill to reveal the cooking tray underneath. Powered by electric coils, the Multifunctional Flip-top Electric Oven works both as a conventional oven, and even moonlights as an electric grill, letting you quickly flip open the lid and cook just on the lower heating coils like a barbecue grill. “The design not only allows for the integration of various cooking methods such as baking, frying, grilling, and roasting, but it also makes cleaning the inner cavity simple”, says Xinbao, the Chinese electrical appliance giant which acquired Morphy Richards earlier this year and handles its manufacturing and distribution in the mainland.

Designer: Guang Dong Xinbao Electrical Appliances Holdings

What’s wonderful about the Multifunctional Flip-top Electric Oven’s design is that it’s still compact and intuitive to use, despite offering more features in the same product footprint. The appliance comes with a temperature slider and two dial controls that let you select the cooking mode and the time. You can either open the oven’s door forwards like in conventional electric ovens (to slide baking trays or pizzas in) or lift the entire door upwards to open it like a grill (to check on cakes and casseroles or to season/baste meats and other dishes).

“The M-shaped upper heating tube allows more heat source, while the O-shaped lower heating tube allows more even heating”, Xinbao’s design team mentioned. “The oven is also designed to make cleaning easier. Simply empty the oil-collecting tray and flip the cover to clean hard-to-reach corners”, they added.

The Multifunctional Flip-top Electric Oven is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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Portable crib with travel wheels and a foldable design can be stowed away or moved on command

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Babies have perhaps the largest footprint of any human combined. They get a bed that’s much larger than their proportions, have their own gizmos for the dining table, the car, and the outdoors, and let’s not dive into the sheer number of diapers they go through in a month. The point I’m trying to get to is that babies, by virtue of their accessories, can occupy tonnes of space… although the Bababing Bedside & Travel Crib wants that to change. Built with a unique foldable design that shuts flat (so you can store it in wardrobes, behind headboards, or underneath beds, the Bababing Bedside & Travel Crib is an award-winning crib that’s designed for comfort but also for compactness. Aside from folding shut, the crib comes with 360° caster wheels that allow you to move it around (in both closed or open formats) and lock them in place when you don’t want your crib shifting. This makes moving the crib from one room to another rather easy, making it easier for parents to manage a grumpy baby at night.

Designer: Ashley Robinson (Bababing UK)

The Bababing Bedside & Travel Crib’s super-quick foldable/collapsible feature is a ‘market first’, the company says. It folds down to a slim profile that can be wheeled around and stored easily as well as stashed in the back of a car for taking with you on holidays and trips. The folding mechanism actuates with a simple click, requiring no dismantling whatsoever. The crib comes with a luxury soft and breathable inner lining (Kose CoolTM) that provides babies with utmost comfort regardless of the weather, and right underneath the bed is a dedicated storage space for keeping the baby’s belongings and accouterments.

The Bababing Bedside & Travel Crib comes with all the safety tests in accordance with baby crib standards. Other core features include fully lockable wheels for safety, netted sides to improve airflow and breathability, and visual details like wooden trims, high-quality fabrics, and machine-washable materials.

The Bababing Bedside & Travel Crib is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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LG teases experimental transparent OLED TV that doubles as a shelf, notification center, and artificial fireplace

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Although transparent OLEDs haven’t really become mainstream yet, it’s worth thinking about some of the places they could actually be useful. Take the OLED Shelf, for example – an award-winning concept from LG. Designed to blend right into your home’s decor, the OLED shelf comes with a mantelpiece on top, and a transparent glass panel on the base, running all the way to the floor. Where reality truly blurs into magic is when a part of the transparent glass panel comes to life with pixels, turning into a television. Designed to be a shelf, television, notification center, or even an ambient light, the OLED Shelf truly puts transparent displays to good use – and with the ability to selectively activate pixels, it really creates an experience that feels magical, with transparent glass suddenly turning into opaque dynamic images!

Designer: LG Display Co., Ltd.

With every sufficiently advanced technology, its most important metric of success comes from its perceived application. A good product drives customer adoption, which then helps bring down the price of the tech, making it even more accessible. It’s the reason why folding phones and rolling TVs have failed to bring down the price of flexible OLED touchscreens because the tech hasn’t become the commercial success companies hoped it would. Transparent OLEDs suffer a similar fate – the right product isn’t driving the right demand, which is a prerequisite to help bring costs down and production up. That’s where LG’s OLED Shelf hopes to rectify things.

Sort of a Serif TV moment for transparent displays, the OLED Shelf is both a television as well as a mantelpiece, allowing you to place objects on top of it. The TV, for the most part, remains transparent (and therefore blank), but switch it on and the glass magically springs to life. The plain wall behind the TV provides the perfect blank canvas to allow you to see images clearly (a patterned wallpaper would probably create a visual conflict). Moreover, the transparent panel can be more than just a TV, doubling up as a space for widgets, notifications, or even as a faux fireplace!

The OLED Shelf is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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Travel case with built-in baby stroller helps young parents carry their luggage and child together

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Here’s an idea that blew my mind. Why hasn’t a travel-case/baby-stroller hybrid existed yet?? It seems like just the kind of thing a parent would buy and use for a good 5-10 years of their life, so it’s surprising something like this was never made or launched. A winner of this year’s Red Dot Design Concept Award, Easy Journey is a travel case with an integrated stroller that pops right out of the front. Its clever hard-shell case design holds luggage but also has a fully equipped stroller with a hood and leg rest, big enough to fit a child up to the age of 18 to 24 months.

Designers: Chen Shilong, Fu Qiming, Ma Jinjin

Easy Journey is for traveling parents with young toddlers who need to be pushed around in a stroller. Instead of having the stroller exist as an independent product, designers at Taizhou University decided to build one right into a hard-shell travel case. The case comes with enough space on the inside to store your luggage (although the stroller does eat into some of it), and has 3 pairs of 360° wheels. When used as a travel case, it stands vertically, resting on 4 wheels on the bottom. However, when you want to use it in stroller mode, Easy Journey flips onto its back, with an extra pair of wheels popping out of the hardshell case’s interiors. The front (now the top) of the case opens up to reveal a rather comfortable baby seat, taking under a minute to use and set up. Easy Journey is perfect for parents with young kids, although one can make the case that the product has a relatively short lifespan once the kid outgrows the stroller. However, for parents looking to have more than one child, the stroller-case makes for a pretty nifty investment, allowing parents to travel with ease, carrying their luggage and children together in one organized, easy-to-maneuver unit!

The Easy Journey is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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