Tag Archives: Red Dot Awards: Design Concept

Analogue joysticks for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 turn the folding smartphone into a Game Boy

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The Red Dot Design Concept Award-winning case for the Galaxy Z Flip4 takes the folding phone and turns it into the world’s first gaming foldable. Cleverly designed with joysticks and controls that tuck within each other when folded, this Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 accessory still lets you use the phone as is, retaining all its smartphone functionality, albeit with a rather sizeable gaming upgrade!

Designers: Park Sungsu & Jeong Hyeonsook

Designed to turn your folding phone into a console when opened, the ‘Gaming Flex’ is a nifty piece of hardware that also doubles as a smartphone case. Just snap it on and you’ve got what one can only describe as the world’s first folding Nintendo Switch Lite. In its now-folded avatar, the Gaming Flex also becomes the most compact gaming console of its kind… offering the ability to play AAA titles on your phone while being smaller than any official Game Boy ever made.

Perhaps my favorite detail on the Gaming Flex is its yin-yang joystick design. The joysticks protrude outwards for better tactile control, but to make up for the fact that the device needs to fold shut, the D-Pad comes with a hollow design, allowing the joystick to dock right in when shut. It’s a clever detail that isn’t just functional, it’s ergonomic too, offering the perfect concavity for your thumb to rest in as you game!

The Gaming Flex is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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Building-shaped crayon pays tribute to the contemporary architecture of the United Kingdom

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Creaon is a multi-use toy that draws inspiration from the unique street architecture of the UK. It focuses on the creative, open-ended imaginations of children aged 1 to 6. Made of soy wax, Creaon has a variety of features due to its malleability, from drawing pictures to creating different shapes, allowing children to combine gameplay with creative drawing.

The Creaon can be used despite being damaged or broken. Thanks to its wax-based construction, the crayons can still be used as fragments for coloring purposes, or as building blocks for construction, by stacking smaller pieces one above another to create larger, unique builds. “When Creaon has done its job, it will exist in the form of cute paintings for children rather than space hogs for parents”, said designer Tian Menglin. “The material used makes it more environmentally friendly than regular plastic toys, and the cardboard packaging is simple and environmentally friendly.”

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

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Foot-operated computer mouse design wins the Red Dot Award for its unique approach to accessibility

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While accessibility controllers like the ones from Xbox only go so far, this concept mouse by Califor Design provides a better way for the disabled to control their laptop. The Foot Mouse is designed for people who are unable to use their hands due to disability or a neurological condition.

The Foot Mouse, as its name so aptly suggests, transfers control to the feet, allowing you to navigate and click by resting your foot on an ergonomically designed device. This mouse includes standard mouse functions like left and right buttons as well as a mouse scroll. The left and right keys are designed to be operated with the toes. The scrolling function is activated when the left and right buttons are simultaneously pressed and deactivated when one of the left or right keys is released. “The concave design of the mouse’s top surface is combined with human-machine engineering principles to ergonomically fit the complex curvature under the foot, ensuring a stable and comfortable user experience”, Califor Design told Yanko Design. “Foot Mouse is designed to fit feet of any width and size and to provide anti-fatigue support for extended periods of use.”

The Foot Mouse is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

Designer: Califor Design

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This three-way pencil sharpener lets you connect small pencils by screwing them together

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Have you ever tried writing with a small pencil? Honest to god, it’s a mighty struggle. Small pencils are cute and can fit right behind your ear, but they’re a usability nightmare… although Wang Cheng has a nifty solution to this problem. Just connect a small pencil to a larger one like cabins on a train. Cheng’s Eco-Friendly Pencil Sharpener lets you do just that. With three sharpening areas, Cheng’s design lets you conventionally sharpen a pencil as well as thread or tap them, turning them into wooden screws that can then be screwed into one another.

A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, the Eco-Friendly Pencil Sharpener increases the lifespan of those tiny pencil stubs simply by allowing you to elongate them. Thread one end of the small pencil and tap a larger pencil, and you can simply screw one pencil into another, making it a bigger pencil that lasts longer and reduces waste. Pretty nifty, no?!

Designer: Wang Cheng (Dwfuture Design)

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3D-printed spectacle frames come with a hollow honeycomb design that’s made to fit your face

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The process of finding the right pair of spectacles still seems to be stuck in the dark ages. It’s strange that even in the year 2022, we have to try out every single pair of spectacles until we find the ‘right pair’. Seems oddly archaic, doesn’t it? Well, Bezier is providing a rather new-age solution to a problem that hasn’t entirely been overhauled yet. Bezier takes care of the entire spectacle-choosing ordeal by bringing algorithmic scanning and generative design into the equation.

Designers: Alfredo Mendez & Fernando Ventura

Bezier creates a 3D map ofyour face simply via video, being able to plot out important points that help it design the best frames for your face. It then presents you with options designed specifically to fit your facial structure and sense of style. Once selected, the frames get 3D printed, and are guaranteed to fit you perfectly because they were made FOR YOU.

What’s unique about the Bezier frames is their rather quirky design. The frames come with a hollow hexagon lattice that gives them a moire-ish effect, making them see-through from the front yet opaque at an angle. This effect allows the glasses to ‘change color’ depending on where you look at them from. The honeycomb structure also gives the frames strength without the excess weight, making them perfectly lightweight too!

The Bezier frames are a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.

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Hyundai wins the 2022 Red Dot Design Concept Luminary Award for their Hydrogen-powered Trailer Drone

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Out of more than 4000 entries to the Red Dot Design Concept this year, the Hyundai Design Center (the in-house studio for Hyundai Motor Company) edged out a win for their Trailer Drone – a unique and innovative future mobility solution that combines fuel cells, trucks, trailers and robots on a single platform to make logistics easier, faster, safer, and more sustainable.

The Trailer Drone works on a fully autonomous framework, requiring absolutely no human intervention in the operational process. The large E-Bogies house the fuel cells as well as provide a large space for cargo, and are operated by the platform-shaped drones that plug into the front and rear, giving it increased and autonomous mobility. “The e-Bogie, derived from railroad car technology, is a driverless mobility concept that efficiently houses essential components such as propulsion, control, steering, and suspension units within a limited space”, say the Hyundai Design team led by team lead Lee SangYup.

Designer: Hyundai Design Center

The Trailer Drone is an exhaustive and modular ecosystem featuring E-Bogies and smart drone platforms that can operate them within warehouses as well as on roads with Level 5 autonomy. The lack of humans makes the entire operation safer and smarter, and the absence of a traditional ‘cockpit’ means more space to store cargo and additional room for fuel cells, boosting efficiency.

The E-Bogies house multiple hydrogen fuel cells, which provide power to the drone platforms while being 100% emission-free and safe for the environment. The hydrogen tanks, which are mounted at the front and bottom of the E-Bogies, provide a range of 1,600km per charge. The concept secured the Luminary Winner title at this year’s Red Dot Design Concept Award for its unique take on modularity and mobility. The team at Hyundai managed to build a self-sustaining emission-free framework that allows for the efficient transportation of cargo with little human intervention. The drones can transport cargo within storage yards as well as across cities/states, relying on smart level 5 autonomous technologies that allow them to efficiently get from A to B. In the event that multiple trailers need transporting, they link up wirelessly, forming an invisible train of sorts that can efficiently travel on roads and highways without having a human at the wheel.

The Trailer Drone is a Luminary Winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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This award-winning expanding garment was designed for pregnant women to wear to term

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Designed to be comfortably worn while a pregnant mother carries their child, the ‘Retractable Garment’ by IU+ Design features a unique fabric construction that expands aesthetically as the wearer’s body does. A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, the garment relies on a series of uniquely positioned fabric cutouts that grow to form a pattern that is revealed the bigger the baby bump gets!

“Using pattern variations, the retractable garment meets the functional demands of pregnant women throughout the entire process”, say lead designers Shen Jiye and Chen Yujie. “In other words, the garment witnesses the entire pregnancy.”

Designer: ShenZhen IU+ Design Co., Ltd.

“The abdomen area of the garment is made to be flexible and adjustable to accommodate the various stages of pregnancy. It is made with a certain tension that allows the fabric to stretch over the baby bump, and the patterns expand to fit the shape of the stomach, creating a one-of-a-kind look”, the designers mention. Moreover, the garment can even be worn after a child is born, thereby reducing unnecessary fashion waste.

This concept, while unique, builds on an underlying idea that clothes should be designed to last as long as possible while accommodating growth and developmental factors. A similar project, titled Petit Pli, used pleated fabric that allowed the clothes to expand as a child grew, enabling them to wear the same clothes for years instead of mere months.

The Retractable Garment is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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This vlogger’s camera comes with DSLR-like features packed into a self-recording-friendly format

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Take a look at any professional camera and its design has a certain logic to it. Especially if you look at the heavier DSLRs, they’re made to be ergonomic and held a certain way. You can’t hold a DSLR with your left hand, the grip’s made in a way that only promotes right-handed usage. Similarly, not all cameras come with screens that pivot 180° to face forwards. In short, a DSLR or Mirrorless camera is made to record other subjects, not yourself. In comes the VoCam concept to change that.

A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, VoCam explores a vlogger-specific camera style that enables self-recording among other recording styles. The three key areas where the camera truly shines is A. in its orientation-agnostic form that can be held in portrait and landscape formats for the recording style and social media outlet of your choosing, B. the adjustable screen that faces all the way forward so you can record yourself as effortlessly as you would on a smartphone, and C. the grip on the side that opens up into a pop-out handle/grip for carrying your camera while walking and recording. The camera is also pretty much designed to be an expert kit right out of the box. It doesn’t need extra lenses or additional accessories like tripods. Sure, you can upgrade your camera with USB storage, gimbals, etc., but the VoCam is designed to be as capable as possible with minimal upgrading required!

Designer: Fan Chenchen

The VoCam’s design comes from China-based designer Fan Chenchen, with inspirations that clearly feel like a hat-tip to Polaroid’s fun, young-demographic-friendly style. It features an f1.8 lens on the front that seems to be the exact same one found on the Sony RX100, and if we’re going by that reference, the VoCam also probably has a massive 20.2MP 1-inch CMOS sensor underneath, allowing for high amounts of light capture that is perfect for shooting in all kinds of light.

What’s really remarkable about the VoCam is that it isn’t just a camera. It’s a full-fledged recording station that has the best of all worlds. The lens, like I mentioned earlier, is top-notch, but the camera also comes with a 180° adjustable screen that lets you record others as well as yourself. There’s a rather large pop-out flashlight on one side of the camera that can be made to face any which way, and on the other side, right underneath the detachable grip is an adjustable boom mic of sorts, giving you the ability to record videos with stellar audio to match.

To keep the purists happy, however, the VoCam has a tripod mount located on its side (visible through the hollow part of the flashlight). It also has an SD card slot and a USB-C port to keep the camera charged.

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Absolutely ingenious flat-pack travel kettle comes with bellow-inspired expanding design

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A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award last year, the ‘Folding Kettle for Travel’ demonstrates how a simple eureka moment can help create a product so clever, it’ll have you wondering why nobody ever thought of it before. The Folding Kettle comes with a flat-pack design that opens up rather cleverly, expanding its volume while creating a kettle that’s stable enough to stand vertically on any surface. “Due to its unique storage structure, the capacity of this travel-friendly folding kettle after unfolding is approximately 1.2 litres”, says C60 Design’s team lead Chu Wenbao. “It has three main characteristics: simple operation, easy storage, and a minimal aesthetic.” The kettle’s travel-friendly design borrows a lot from a travel iron. It’s compact when you need it to be, and functional when opened. It also has a detachable cable that allows you to connect it to a power outlet to heat water wherever you are.

Designer: C60Design

The Folding Kettle for Travel is made from a combination of flame-resistant plastic, 304 stainless steel, and food-grade silicone (for the bellow). When folded, it occupies 1/3rd of the space of a regular kettle, becoming about as slim as a Memobottle so it fits easily into most travel cases. When you need to heat up some water, just plug the kettle in and switch it on using the button right above the handle. The bottle switches off automatically when the water is heated, and a lockable spout on the front lets you easily pour out said water to brew a nice cup of tea or coffee!

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This electric train’s transparent panoramic roof gives you an open-air view as you travel across the country

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Designed by 2050.LAB, the AIRSCP is a concept electric-driven train designed to elevate the travel experience. Its cutting-edge design cleverly combines metal and glass, creating an exterior that’s equal-parts sleek, aerodynamic, edgy, and luxurious. The defining characteristic of the AIRSCP? Its stunning panoramic roof that allows people seated on the upper tier to have an incredible open-air experience while on their journey.

A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, AIRSCP strives for “new, pleasant passenger experiences that will convince people to use public transportation instead of private vehicles”, says the design team at 2050.LAB, a Russia-based transport-focused design studio.

Designer: 2050.LAB

The electric train comes with a two-tiered seating system, offering the ability to carry more passengers per trip. The AIRSCP’s design, however, isn’t like your average train. It comes with a sprawling cockpit for the driver, complete with a wide windshield and a display on top that lets people know where the train’s headed. People enter the train through doors on the sides, and can either be seated on the lower tier, or head to the upper tier for a more immersive experience, thanks to the large transparent roof that offers either an abundance of natural light or the ability to ride cross-country under the stars.

The AIRSCP comes with a bright light mounted right above the train’s display, illuminating the road ahead, while an overhang on the bottom front serves as a crash protection system, ensuring the safety of the passengers and the driver. The area right above the control cockpit provides a unique PoV for the riders, allowing them to see things from the driver’s perspective. “With soft and comfortable surfaces, it can even be used as a children’s playground or a place of relaxation”, mentions 2050.LAB’s team lead Eugeny Maslov.

The AIRSCP is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.

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