Tag Archives: Red Dot Concept 2022

This trekking backpack is the world’s first to ever incorporate a 3D-printed cushioning mesh

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In 2017, Adidas made waves by building the first shoe with a 3D-printed midsole. Oechsler’s Trekking Backpack is bringing that game-changing technology to a new domain. Bags and shoes have quite a few areas of overlap. They’re both designed to take on load, and are built for comfort… so it only makes sense that innovative tech in the footwear industry make its way to the backpack industry. It seems like that’s finally happening, with Oechsler’s Red Dot Design Concept Award-winning Trekking Backpack. Although rather simply named, the pack comes with a unique additively-printed TPU lattice structure that helps provide a cushioning surface between the bag’s back panel and the human carrying it. Designed to be ergonomic, lightweight, and use lesser material than an actual cushion, this unique detail uses a special Ultrasint® TPU01 material that “provides strong, flexible, and ultra-durable part performance while maintaining excellent surface quality”.

“Thanks to the design flexibility enabled by 3D printing, the back pads and hip fins can be produced in a single piece out of one material. This significantly reduces assembly steps, time and cost”, say the designers at Oechsler, a Germany-based polymer innovation company. “The printed part no longer requires gluing or sewing. Moreover, unprocessed powder gets fully reused in subsequent print jobs and printed parts are 100% recyclable at the end of their lifecycles.”

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

Designer: OECHSLER AG

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Award-winning bedside clock has a built-in pill dispenser that reminds you to regularly take your medicines

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Snagging the coveted Red Dot Design Concept Award in the Best of Best category, the +CLOCK is an automatic pill organizer and dispenser that functions like a clock but distributes pills at the time set by the user. “It is intended to establish a routine for the user to take the medication on a regular basis”, says designer Ju Chan Ho. “When it is time to take medication, +CLOCK plays an alarm that the user has set and distributes the pills to the tray.”

The +CLOCK isn’t merely a clock. It’s more of a habit-building device that also happens to tell the time, hence the name +CLOCK for the fact that it’s also a clock. The gizmo sits on any bedside table and comes with an appearance comparable to the Tmall Genie Queen smart mirror. Underneath its large clock face sits a carousel featuring 28 slots for daily meds. You can input medicines based on days or the time of the day, with the ability to fill up to 28 slots. This effectively means the +CLOCK lets you schedule up to 28 days of medicines or a week of medicines if taken 4 times a day, giving caretakers enough time to refill the next lot once the pills have been dispensed. When it’s time to take your meds, the +CLOCK alerts you with an alarm that dispenses the pills when you snooze it, helping you build a habit to take your medicines!

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

Designer: Ju Chan Ho

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These TWS earbuds clip to your outer ear, giving you an open-ear design with natural ‘transparency’

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I never realized what a large sub-section of earphone-wearers don’t like wearing in-ear earbuds. It does seem like a relatively small amount, but given the option, a lot of us would just prefer something that rests comfortably on your ears without entering the ear canal. The reasons aren’t just comfort – some people have different-sized canals that don’t fit conventional buds, others don’t like the idea of dirty earbuds entering their ears, and perhaps the mot valid one, they block out external noises. Sure, most earbuds today come with their own ‘transparency modes’, but nothing beats actually being able to hear the world around you – a feature that the Sony LinkBuds embrace wholly.

The Open-Ear-Design TWS Earbuds fix that problem by clipping onto your ear instead of sitting inside them. The earbuds’ unique design allows it to attach to your ‘pinna’, or the external part of your ear that’s mostly cartilage. This shape and format keep the earbuds attached to your ear, and has the audio driver facing your ear but not sitting inside it. The result is comfortable listening without blocking your ear canal, so you can also hear stuff around you. The earbuds themselves are made from hard plastic on the outside, but employ soft silicone padding on the inside that grips most ears comfortably. When not worn, they snap rather wonderfully onto their charging case, using a magnetic mechanism to ensure they never fall off and accidentally get lost.

The Open-Air-Design TWS Earbuds are a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

Designers: Chen Chaohou, Li Yuze, Nie Dong, Peng Ziheng, Shi Yu, Yang Jin, Zheng Yuzhou

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Memphis-inspired streaming box comes with a unique intersecting design to prevent remote loss

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While the idea of losing a remote will pretty much still terrify anyone for the rest of their lives, the Pop Art TV Box has a uniquely creative solution – use someone’s OCD to combat their forgetfulness! With a unique design that has the TV’s remote intersecting with the TV’s hardware unit itself, the Pop Art relies on visual gestalt to complete itself. You’re much less likely to lose the remote, because you’re going to be compelled to dock it in its place once you’re done… sort of like how you dock a telephone receiver into its holder.

Designer: Shenzhen Skyworth Digital Technology

The Pop Art’s design borrows from the Memphis 2.0 and Bauhaus design styles, relying on simple geometric shapes and bold colors to create powerful compositions. The hardware duo features a square-shaped streaming box, with a cutout designed to dock the circular disc-shaped remote, allowing it to wirelessly charge when docked. “This recess serves as a visual cue for users to return the remote control to the charging dock when not in use. When the remote control is put back in place, the set-top box automatically shuts down to save power”, say the designers.

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

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Modular music instrument lets you create your own combination of strings, pads, and keys

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A winner of this year’s Red Dot Design Concept Best of Best Award, Bitboard is an electronic instrument that presents an absolutely no-barriers approach to making music. With modular inputs that snap together to create the instrument, Bitboard lets you combine guitar strings, keys, pads, and even controls like faders to create the Frankenstein Musical Instrument of your choice. The underlying idea? Music-making is a creative process but it’s still fundamentally tactile… so it only makes sense to empower creators in various ways to create music how they see fit!

Designer: Chen Hsin Ju

Named after the fact that it’s an instrument that uses electronic music-making techniques as opposed to real acoustics, the Bitboard is a MIDI device with various input mechanisms. The instrument starts with an empty canvas, or fretboard that lets you mount modules onto it. The module ecosystem features various input devices, designed to offer different input styles. You’ve got keys, pads, strings, rings, sliders, and a whole variety of snap-on modules, giving you the ability to simultaneously shred on a guitar, play airy electronic synths, or even mix samples and loops with turntable-inspired modules and crossfaders/sliders. “The surface texture is simplified from the instrument’s appearance and operational characteristics to provide players with intuitive tactile feedback”, says designer Chen Hsin Ju.

The board offers a little something for everyone. It can be used by novices looking to try their hand at multiple instruments without splurging on them, music aficionados, experts, street musicians, deejays, and even electronic music professionals. The board is easy and intuitive to use, and offers a few nifty features, including recording, volume adjustment, looping, and even wireless connectivity via Bluetooth so you can hook your Bitboard to a speaker or even your own computer. “Taking originality to a whole new level, Bitboard challenges stereotypes and opens up new possibilities for musical instruments, allowing one to explore interesting musical forms through creative combinations”, the designer mentions.

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

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Maven’s brutalist wristwatch highlights beauty in simplicity with its ‘raw and honest’ design

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Time might be fluid, but Brut by Maven gives it a rigid, almost cold appearance. Named after Brutalism, the architectural style that emerged in the 1950s, the Brut watch echoes a level of raw simplicity that feels incredibly honest. Like a person that doesn’t mince their words, and says exactly how they feel, the watch is all about being ‘Brutally honest & brutally simple’.

I use the words rigid and cold not as derogatory terms, but rather as attributes that have their own beauty. There’s beauty in rigid/cold icebergs, as there are in concrete buildings from the Brutalist era. Brut echoes a similar sentiment with its blocky appearance that pays tribute to the architecture seen in the post-war reconstruction of the UK. The style was recognized as being honest and simple, providing an accessible gateway for people of all backgrounds. “In the decades since, this approach to architectural design has become increasingly revered and recognized for its unexpected beauty, honest degree of charm, and unquestionable functionality”, says the team at Maven.

Designer: Maven Watches Limited.

The Brut combines the two most common geometric shapes associated with timepieces. The body is made from sandblasted stainless steel, with a square silhouette within which sits the circular watch face. The negative space is left bare, creating the perfect canvas for the watch’s clean, radial-brushed dial to shine through. The square also uses beveled edges to create minimal expressiveness, the kind associated with the raw functionality of Brutalism.

Brutalism is associated with going back to basics, not showcasing opulence or any sort of excesses. The watch reflects that rather wonderfully, with simple markings around the dial, a tiny date window at the 3 o’clock position and just a simple engraved Maven logo at the bottom right corner of the watch’s square body.

The Brut runs on a Japanese Quartz movement, encased in the stainless steel body that’s available in silver or anodized black. The movement and dial are capped by sapphire quartz, known for its tough scratch-resistant abilities. The Brut comes in two styles, the silver watch body is paired with a brown Italian leather strap for a classic appeal, while the ‘graphite’ variant gets paired with a black strap to give it a cohesive look.

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

The watch’s brutalist approach extends to its packaging too, which resembles the plain, geometric concrete aesthetic seen in brutalist buildings

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This delicately designed ceiling light looks like it’s floating in mid-air

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Sandwiched between two metal structures that measure a whopping 10 feet when combined, the Aria is a lighting solution that puts emphasis on the term ‘light’. It looks almost like it’s floating in mid-air, with the three light spheres suspended between the metal structures almost like they’re frozen in time. There’s immense visual tension in the light because you expect the glowing orbs to roll around on their metal rails… but that visual tension is left unresolved, and that’s what makes Aria so interesting!

Designer: Gabriela Saadia

A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, Aria combines lighting with the delicate beauty of visual imbalance. The lighting solution, designed to look minimal yet expressive, comes with three glowing orbs held in place by two curved metal structures. The orbs stay suspended in the middle, balancing out the structure both visually and by weight, and the lack of any perceivable electrical wires leading directly to the lights really make it fascinating to people who observe it!

“Aria is made of a 1-inch rolled steel tube that is powder-coated in copper and three white acrylic sphere diffusers. Its construction magic is imperceptible to the naked eye — everything happens inside the acrylic spheres”, designer Gabriela Saadia told Yanko Design. The same structure that holds the lamp together also holds the light source, which consists of three LED lightbulbs. The entire structure remains suspended by two metal cables, and can be adjusted to any size or even easily disassembled for transportation.

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Award-winning rocking chair uses a tensile fabric and metal framework to achieve uniqueness

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Close your eyes and imagine a rocking chair. You probably thought of the archetypal chair, right? The kind granddads sit on – made from wood, with armrests, a long back, and probably a creaking sound when rocked. Chances are that what you imagined was NOTHING like the ZHE rocking chair. Designed to bring a sense of disruption to how comfortably boring rocking chairs have begun looking, ZHE does things differently. Instead of wood, it uses a metal structure with a stretchable fabric draped on it. The fabric, which contorts and bends due to tension (or tensile strength), ends up forming the unique contoured shape of the ZHE chair. Sit on it and it feels like sitting on the future – there’s no wood under your body, just fabric, metal, and a sense of weightlessness as you rock to and fro!

Designer: Alan Hung

ZHE’s lightweight appeal comes from the fact that it’s designed around the core idea of ‘nothingness’. It’s essentially just a bent metal-tube frame with fabric draped over it, but it’s the way the fabric drapes over that gives ZHE all its character. The fabric wraps almost entirely around the metal armature, except for a small arc at the bottom which pulls the seat down and gives it concavity. It doesn’t particularly look like the fabric can be removed, washed, or interchanged, but then again those seem almost like secondary details.

The ZHE isn’t like your average rocking chair, as I’ve alluded to… but it behaves just like a traditional one. Sink into the comfort of its fabric seat and rock back and forth like you normally would. The curved metal channels on the base allow the chair to rock back and forth, while the chair’s fabric gives you the feeling of being in a hammock of sorts!

The ZHE Rocking Chair is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2022.

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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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