(smow) blog compact: Interieur Awards 2014 – Winners

As part of the build up to this year’s Kortrijk Design Biennale the winners of the Interieur Awards 2014 were announced in Brussels at the end of May.

Organised since 1974 the Interieur Award is an inter-disciplinary, international design award open to young designers. Past winners include Jurgen Bey (1990), Maarten Van Severen (1992) and Florian Kallus (2010)

For the 2014 edition the Interieur Award was run in two categories “Spaces” and “Objects”

The Spaces category called for submissions for the design of the bars at this years festival, the international jury selecting five concepts from design studios from Sweden, Germany, Italy and Belgium which will all now be realised. And hopefully enjoyed by the Biennale 2014 visitors.

The Objects category received some 240 entries from which the jury awarded the €2,500 first prize to Rotterdam based studio Minale Maeda aka Kuniko Maeda and Mario Minale for their Keystones table project, a project which employs 3D printed connectors as the basis for a furniture family. In Minale Maeda’s vision the connector can be printed locally and the remaining parts of the table sourced locally, thus, in effect, negating the need for complex, global distribution network while still offering customers a degree of flexibility and customisability in their furniture. According to jury member Rolf Hay, founder and CEO of Copenhagen based manufacturer HAY, Keystone represents “the first time for me as a manufacturer digital printing makes sense in a product context as it is binding together everything in an intelligent and clever way”

Which we believe is longhand for “watch this space”

In addition to Minale Maeda the jury, who alongside Rolf Hay included Robert Klanten, publisher and editor-in-chief of Die Gestalten Verlag, Lina Kanafani from Mint London and Depot Basel’s Matylda Krzykowski, selected a further 19 projects including All Wood Stool by Karoline Fesser, Svampe by Alice Viallet and Dune Carpets by Sarah Böttger & Hanna Emelie Ernsting.

The creators of all 20 selected projects are now invited to a workshop at the Domaine de Boisbuchet cultural centre in south-west France this August where, amongst other festivities, an exhibition of prototypes will be organised for show in Kortrijk in September.

Once we’ve seen the exhibition we’ll let you know how well the developed concept worked.

But until then, Congratulations to all!

Full details can be found at www.interieur.be

Keystones Table by Minale Maeda. Winner of the "Object" category at the Interieur Awards 2014

....and the all important element in a little more detail.