Following upon wins at Germany’s iF product design award and the red dot design award in March, Taiwanese companies once again highlighted their product design capabilities by winning two silver and three bronze awards at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition, a Taiwan Design Center (TDC, 台灣創意設計中心) official said yesterday.
The winners were announced on Friday.
Aside from high-tech design items such as wireless Voice-over-Internet Protocol phone and mobile Internet device (MID) user interfaces, other winning products by Taiwanese included conventional products such as bicycle lights and a portable barbeque grill.
“Winning these international design awards will add value to their products and enhance their competitiveness, which will also help Taiwanese brands enter the European and US markets,” Tony Chang (張光民), chief executive officer of TDC, said by telephone yesterday.
Chang said the awards also showed that Taiwan has transformed itself from a traditional labor-based economy into a knowledge-based economy, and that both conventional and high-tech industries will have to start using innovation, design and brands to make money in an increasingly competitive world.
Among the five winning designs was local consumer electronics maker BenQ Corp’s (明基電通) MID user interface.
“While the Greater China region in general is still more product-oriented, BenQ will focus more on consumers’ using behavior while developing market-oriented products,” Manfred Wang (王千睿), chief design officer at BenQ’s Lifestyle Design Center (數位時尚設計中心), said by telephone yesterday.
Moreover, Chang said he expects local firms will grab more than 200 awards by the end of this year. So far this year, Taiwanese have received 165 awards.
This would represent a watershed in design capability, he said.
Taiwanese firms snapped a total of 148 international awards in 2006 and 133 last year, Chang said.
The annual IDEA program is sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and Business Week. The award was formerly known as the Industrial Design Excellence Awards.
IDEA, the iF product design award, the red dot design award and Japan’s Good Design Award (G-Mark), are the four major international product design awards.
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