Bringing you a bit of positivity amidst these uncertain times, the A’ Design Awards 2020 announced their results for the year. Spanning literally a hundred categories, the A’ Design Awards look at creating a holistic list of the best designs internationally, across all disciplines. While the Coronavirus has definitely put a damper on awards who are looking to conduct exhibitions and gala nights for their winners, that hasn’t stopped the A’ Design Award from making sure their winners get their share of the international limelight! The A’ Design Award and Competition is more than just an awards program. It actively seeks good design, markets it, brings value to the project as well as the designer in the form of a wide range of value-added services like a dedicated PR Campaign, an online exhibition, and even a platform to sell your design on… and these perks aren’t just limited to the design, they extend to the designers and creators too. Your participation entitles you to a proof-of-creation document, inclusion in A’ Design’s Business Network, and the Design Fee Calculator service that lets you accurately price your design services for clients. Judged by a grand jury of 218 elite designers and educators, here are a select few of A’ Design Award and Competition 2020’s winners. We’ve hand-picked some of our favorites from this year’s list of winners spanning categories such as Product Design, Social Design, Tech, Furniture, Medical, and Installation Design. Scroll down below to have a look at what’s making the waves this year in the design circuit! And don’t forget to register below to participate in the competition for 2020-21 to make sure your work as well as you get the recognition you deserve! It’s sheerly uncanny timing that the Butterfly Aircraft Seat, submitted last year, could nail the exact specifics of what’s needed in airline seats today! James Lee’s design uses partitions between seats to allow both passengers to enforce social distancing, and the seats are slightly offset too, with individual armrests so there’s really no situation where you could accidentally come in contact with the person behind you. Clever, eh?? Practically defying the laws of physics, the Millo is perhaps the most futuristic blender I’ve seen. For starters, it’s sleek, and is dominated by aesthetic, flat surfaces, with absolutely no exposed mechanical parts. The blender is divided into two units. The base, a pristine, flat dock with no control panel or even a driving socket and its second part, the glass, a stylish Nutribullet-esque container that connects to the base using wireless technology. Just load your smoothie ingredients into the Millo, screw the top on, and rest it inverted on the base… and just like a phone starts charging the moment you rest it on a wireless-charging surface, the Millo begins whirring and blitzing all your ingredients into a fine smoothie. You can control the Millo’s intensity by sliding your finger around the rim of the base, as lights under the surface come to life, letting you see what power you’re running the blender at. When you’re done, lift the blender up and the blade magically stops spinning. It’s a sight to absolutely admire! The Superegg is an installation that vividly expresses our addiction for consumption and how it’s affecting nature. The installation comes in the shape of an egg, resembling nature, but step closer and you notice that the egg’s constructed from 3000 Nespresso and Keurig coffee pods. The pods, made of plastic and aluminum, are designed to be single-use and often find themselves becoming a major part of the waste that enters our ocean. Designer Jaco Roeloffs constructed the egg using 9 plywood wheels to provide the structure with shape, and 64 aluminum strips that he then mounted the coffee-pods onto. The installation looks beautiful during the day, but absolutely comes alive at night when lights inside it shine, causing the egg to glow and create absolutely mesmeric shadows against the sand, effectively turning waste into something beautiful. Designed to maximise shock absorption while minimizing material used, the Voronoi Helmet employs generative design to create a helmet using a voronoi mesh. The mesh forms an outer impact-absorbing layer around a hard-hat, giving you extra cushioning in the event of an accident. It even allows air to flow through, keeping your head ventilated while you’re riding your bike! The Arc Guitar Stand has an incredible sculptural quality to it, which is unusual for a product that’s usually designed to be really functional. A guitar stand is usually quite an unassuming product that fundamentally exists as a background element to the guitar, which sits atop it. With the Arc, the stand has an aesthetic appeal that makes it look beautiful even when there isn’t a guitar resting on it. Besides, its design does a pretty good job of propping up the instrument too! Is it a speaker? Is it a stand? Is it a stationery-mat? How about all three? The Waving Multifunctional Speaker is just a really cleverly designed product that works as a speaker, but also uses its form and surfaces to provide additional functions. For starters, it comes with a slide-out element at the back that lets you wedge your phone into the speaker in landscape or portrait. If that wasn’t enough, the speaker’s wavy textured surface makes it great for resting pens and miscellaneous stationery on. Pretty neat, if you ask me. The Sada Hubless Bike’s unique foldable design allows it to fold down to a form that’s barely larger than a beach umbrella. While currently in the prototype phase, future versions of the bike will be built in aluminum and carbon fiber, making it as light as it is compact, so you can quite literally ride the bike when you need, and carry it around like a skateboard when you don’t! The Zhiwen thermometer lets you constantly monitor the temperature of its wearer using wireless technology. Designed to be small enough to permanently sit on the skin without causing much discomfort, the thermometer beams its readings to a control unit that allows you to check the wearer’s temperature, as well as the thermometer’s overall battery. When the thermometer runs out of charge, just take it off and slide it into the charging hub located right within the control unit! Behold the Black Hole Speaker… designed to attract your attention the way a black hole attracts all mass. Based on the design of the Harman Kardon Aura, with a few tweaks and changes to give it intergalactic appeal, the Black Hole sports a warped torus design, with a hyperbolic base, and quite literally a black hole at the very center of the torus. The Black Hole speaker comes with a speckled design on its black base that resembles stars being pulled into the void, along with a concentric ripple texture that is symbolic of a black hole’s ability to create ripples in time and space. It’s all incredibly symbolic! The speaker runs on Bluetooth (because there are no wires in outer space), and if you dare to approach it, there’s a control panel around its event horizon. Have you ever heard of chocolate so good it won an award? Well the Dengo Chocolate Bar didn’t win one for taste, but it surely did one for its innovative approach to segmentation! The 80g chocolate bar deviates from the basic grid system that most bars have, and opts for an organic texture that’s actually inspired by the cacao bean. You kinda have to agree that the result is just simply eye-catching and mouth-watering!