skip to Main Content

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Celebrating Don Noman, Mi Ecosystem and Two K-12 Designs

Shanghai, September 15, 2022 | The Frontier Design Prize announced the winners of its inaugural edition during the opening ceremony of the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC).  Mr. QU Xing, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, Mr. GONG Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai, Ms. XU Xiaolan, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology (China), along with leading designers, scholars and industry leaders, attended the award ceremony.

The Frontier Design Prize (FDP) is a visionary, innovative, world-class design award established with the aims of encouraging design innovation, enhancing the impact of design in driving industrial transformation, and promoting the role of design in shaping a better world. A central program of WDCC, it is undertaken by Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) with guidance from the Shanghai Municipal Government. 

Three prize categories are set up to reward and recognize outstanding personalities and works of design that have made a pioneering contribution to the design field with far-reaching international influence: Distinguished Contribution, Innovation of the Year, and Innovation of the Year (K-12). FDP is the first international design prize to recognize the work of K-12 students.  In 2022, the Distinguished Contribution Prize and Innovation of the Year Prize have a monetary award of 1 million RMB respectively, and the Innovation of the Year (K-12) winners will share an award of 100,000 RMB. 

This year’s winners are:

Distinguished Contribution

  • Donald Arthur Norman

Citation: Prof. Don Norman is the leading advocate of human-centered design and a pioneer in user experience design. Combining design with social science and engineering, he has made pioneering contributions to the fields of cognitive science, human factors engineering and interaction design. His books, such as The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, became classics well read by most design students and professionals around the world. His latest book, Design for a Better World argues for a more powerful use of designers as champions of human behavior in this time of ecological crises.

Innovation of the Year

  • Mi Ecosystem (by De Liu & Mi Ecosystem Team)

Citation: The Mi Ecosystem presents a truly systematic approach to design and manufacturing that empowers designers and design entrepreneurs through technical and supply chain support. To date, it has supported more than 330 design-driven startups, enabling an annual production value of close to 100 billion RMB, and has infused world-class design and the concept of smart living into the everyday lives of 63-million Chinese middle-class families.

Innovation of the Year (K-12)

  • Modular Garbage Front-end Processor Combination (by Zekai Ren, Shanghai, China)

Citation: This project tackled the unpleasant and yet often neglected process of garbage collection and storage in residential communities with a bold and integrated proposal. The proposed distributed waste processor combines composting with other forms of biological treatment, localizing waste treatment to reduce pollution and noise from collection, and turning the waste station from an eyesore to a potential community center.

  • Reducing Gender Based Violence in Sierra Leone (by 30 students at Rising Academy, Sierra Leone)

Citation: The boys and girls with an average age of 15 who took part in this design project had no previous exposure to design but demonstrated an ability to quickly adopt a designer mindset, to tap into their lived experience to gain insights, and to take on a very challenging social problem and propose innovative solutions with potential for wide adoption.

This year’s evaluation committee, chaired by Prof. Rosanne Somerson, President Emerita of Rhode Island School of Design, includes 19 design leaders from international institutions including Royal College of Art, MIT, Parsons, Politecnico di Milano, Aalto University, Tongji University, Tsinghua University.

Prof. LOU Yongqi, Chair of the FDP committee, said, “Frontier Design Prize is a very unique international design award that recognizes individuals and works that had paradigm-shifting contributions to design in a large scale.” Prof. Don Norman, the winner of the Distinguished Contribution Prize, said: “I’m glad to see that Shanghai is now using design to shape higher quality sustainable development.”

The nomination-only award collected expert recommendations from around the world, and employed a unique evaluation process that supplements jury voting with AI analysis.

As reference for the jury, a proprietary AI-powered assessment system was developed by Tezign that utilizes knowledge graph and impact factors to evaluate the quantitative performance of the nominees in various dimensions.  

About DIIS:

Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) is a non-profit advanced research institution dedicated to creating world-leading design innovation with real-world impact. Located in the North Bund CBD area of Shanghai, DIIS was founded in 2020 in cooperation with Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and Shanghai Hongkou District Government. With a global design ecosystem and advanced technological research, DIIS is driving industrial transformation through design innovation.

 

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Celebrating Don Noman, Mi Ecosystem and Two K-12 Designs

Shanghai, September 15, 2022 | The Frontier Design Prize announced the winners of its inaugural edition during the opening ceremony of the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC).  Mr. QU Xing, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, Mr. GONG Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai, Ms. XU Xiaolan, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology (China), along with leading designers, scholars and industry leaders, attended the award ceremony.

The Frontier Design Prize (FDP) is a visionary, innovative, world-class design award established with the aims of encouraging design innovation, enhancing the impact of design in driving industrial transformation, and promoting the role of design in shaping a better world. A central program of WDCC, it is undertaken by Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) with guidance from the Shanghai Municipal Government. 

Three prize categories are set up to reward and recognize outstanding personalities and works of design that have made a pioneering contribution to the design field with far-reaching international influence: Distinguished Contribution, Innovation of the Year, and Innovation of the Year (K-12). FDP is the first international design prize to recognize the work of K-12 students.  In 2022, the Distinguished Contribution Prize and Innovation of the Year Prize have a monetary award of 1 million RMB respectively, and the Innovation of the Year (K-12) winners will share an award of 100,000 RMB. 

This year’s winners are:

Distinguished Contribution

  • Donald Arthur Norman

Citation: Prof. Don Norman is the leading advocate of human-centered design and a pioneer in user experience design. Combining design with social science and engineering, he has made pioneering contributions to the fields of cognitive science, human factors engineering and interaction design. His books, such as The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, became classics well read by most design students and professionals around the world. His latest book, Design for a Better World argues for a more powerful use of designers as champions of human behavior in this time of ecological crises.

Innovation of the Year

  • Mi Ecosystem (by De Liu & Mi Ecosystem Team)

Citation: The Mi Ecosystem presents a truly systematic approach to design and manufacturing that empowers designers and design entrepreneurs through technical and supply chain support. To date, it has supported more than 330 design-driven startups, enabling an annual production value of close to 100 billion RMB, and has infused world-class design and the concept of smart living into the everyday lives of 63-million Chinese middle-class families.

Innovation of the Year (K-12)

  • Modular Garbage Front-end Processor Combination (by Zekai Ren, Shanghai, China)

Citation: This project tackled the unpleasant and yet often neglected process of garbage collection and storage in residential communities with a bold and integrated proposal. The proposed distributed waste processor combines composting with other forms of biological treatment, localizing waste treatment to reduce pollution and noise from collection, and turning the waste station from an eyesore to a potential community center.

  • Reducing Gender Based Violence in Sierra Leone (by 30 students at Rising Academy, Sierra Leone)

Citation: The boys and girls with an average age of 15 who took part in this design project had no previous exposure to design but demonstrated an ability to quickly adopt a designer mindset, to tap into their lived experience to gain insights, and to take on a very challenging social problem and propose innovative solutions with potential for wide adoption.

This year’s evaluation committee, chaired by Prof. Rosanne Somerson, President Emerita of Rhode Island School of Design, includes 19 design leaders from international institutions including Royal College of Art, MIT, Parsons, Politecnico di Milano, Aalto University, Tongji University, Tsinghua University.

Prof. LOU Yongqi, Chair of the FDP committee, said, “Frontier Design Prize is a very unique international design award that recognizes individuals and works that had paradigm-shifting contributions to design in a large scale.” Prof. Don Norman, the winner of the Distinguished Contribution Prize, said: “I’m glad to see that Shanghai is now using design to shape higher quality sustainable development.”

The nomination-only award collected expert recommendations from around the world, and employed a unique evaluation process that supplements jury voting with AI analysis.

As reference for the jury, a proprietary AI-powered assessment system was developed by Tezign that utilizes knowledge graph and impact factors to evaluate the quantitative performance of the nominees in various dimensions.  

About DIIS:

Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) is a non-profit advanced research institution dedicated to creating world-leading design innovation with real-world impact. Located in the North Bund CBD area of Shanghai, DIIS was founded in 2020 in cooperation with Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and Shanghai Hongkou District Government. With a global design ecosystem and advanced technological research, DIIS is driving industrial transformation through design innovation.

 

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Celebrating Don Noman, Mi Ecosystem and Two K-12 Designs

Shanghai, September 15, 2022 | The Frontier Design Prize announced the winners of its inaugural edition during the opening ceremony of the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC).  Mr. QU Xing, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, Mr. GONG Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai, Ms. XU Xiaolan, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology (China), along with leading designers, scholars and industry leaders, attended the award ceremony.

The Frontier Design Prize (FDP) is a visionary, innovative, world-class design award established with the aims of encouraging design innovation, enhancing the impact of design in driving industrial transformation, and promoting the role of design in shaping a better world. A central program of WDCC, it is undertaken by Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) with guidance from the Shanghai Municipal Government. 

Three prize categories are set up to reward and recognize outstanding personalities and works of design that have made a pioneering contribution to the design field with far-reaching international influence: Distinguished Contribution, Innovation of the Year, and Innovation of the Year (K-12). FDP is the first international design prize to recognize the work of K-12 students.  In 2022, the Distinguished Contribution Prize and Innovation of the Year Prize have a monetary award of 1 million RMB respectively, and the Innovation of the Year (K-12) winners will share an award of 100,000 RMB. 

This year’s winners are:

Distinguished Contribution

  • Donald Arthur Norman

Citation: Prof. Don Norman is the leading advocate of human-centered design and a pioneer in user experience design. Combining design with social science and engineering, he has made pioneering contributions to the fields of cognitive science, human factors engineering and interaction design. His books, such as The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, became classics well read by most design students and professionals around the world. His latest book, Design for a Better World argues for a more powerful use of designers as champions of human behavior in this time of ecological crises.

Innovation of the Year

  • Mi Ecosystem (by De Liu & Mi Ecosystem Team)

Citation: The Mi Ecosystem presents a truly systematic approach to design and manufacturing that empowers designers and design entrepreneurs through technical and supply chain support. To date, it has supported more than 330 design-driven startups, enabling an annual production value of close to 100 billion RMB, and has infused world-class design and the concept of smart living into the everyday lives of 63-million Chinese middle-class families.

Innovation of the Year (K-12)

  • Modular Garbage Front-end Processor Combination (by Zekai Ren, Shanghai, China)

Citation: This project tackled the unpleasant and yet often neglected process of garbage collection and storage in residential communities with a bold and integrated proposal. The proposed distributed waste processor combines composting with other forms of biological treatment, localizing waste treatment to reduce pollution and noise from collection, and turning the waste station from an eyesore to a potential community center.

  • Reducing Gender Based Violence in Sierra Leone (by 30 students at Rising Academy, Sierra Leone)

Citation: The boys and girls with an average age of 15 who took part in this design project had no previous exposure to design but demonstrated an ability to quickly adopt a designer mindset, to tap into their lived experience to gain insights, and to take on a very challenging social problem and propose innovative solutions with potential for wide adoption.

This year’s evaluation committee, chaired by Prof. Rosanne Somerson, President Emerita of Rhode Island School of Design, includes 19 design leaders from international institutions including Royal College of Art, MIT, Parsons, Politecnico di Milano, Aalto University, Tongji University, Tsinghua University.

Prof. LOU Yongqi, Chair of the FDP committee, said, “Frontier Design Prize is a very unique international design award that recognizes individuals and works that had paradigm-shifting contributions to design in a large scale.” Prof. Don Norman, the winner of the Distinguished Contribution Prize, said: “I’m glad to see that Shanghai is now using design to shape higher quality sustainable development.”

The nomination-only award collected expert recommendations from around the world, and employed a unique evaluation process that supplements jury voting with AI analysis.

As reference for the jury, a proprietary AI-powered assessment system was developed by Tezign that utilizes knowledge graph and impact factors to evaluate the quantitative performance of the nominees in various dimensions.  

About DIIS:

Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) is a non-profit advanced research institution dedicated to creating world-leading design innovation with real-world impact. Located in the North Bund CBD area of Shanghai, DIIS was founded in 2020 in cooperation with Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and Shanghai Hongkou District Government. With a global design ecosystem and advanced technological research, DIIS is driving industrial transformation through design innovation.

 

Read Next

Diabetes Design

Diabetes Design Initiative Presents Community Challenge Designs To Over 50 Stakeholders

Photo Courtesy of Matt Chesin

This Wednesday, September 2nd, the Diabetes Design Initiative presented the culmination of an entire summer of work to over 50 stakeholders in the healthcare industry. The team shared a prototype that will redefine the way how diabetes is explained without numbers and a new design to simplify data sharing.

Led by Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, director of the Center for Health Design, Design Lab fellow Lars Müller, and Ben West, a nightscout developer, DDI is re-thinking how healthcare technology is designed.
Building New Bridges: San Diego And Tijuana’s Combined Bid Breaks Down Barriers To Bi-National Cooperation

Building New Bridges: San Diego and Tijuana’s Combined Bid Breaks Down Barriers to Bi-National Cooperation

As dusk hovered over The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park on October 3 at the ‘Welcome Home, Bienvenido a Casa’ event, reflections off the San Diego Bay illuminated an evening of excited anticipation more than five years in the making. Will the San Diego-Tijuana megaregion take home the win in their bid to be the 2024 World Design Capital? Or will it be their competitors, Moscow?

Hosting the event and spearheading the San Diego-Tijuana bid initiative is the interorganizational collaboration of Design Forward Alliance, UC San Diego Design Lab and the Burnham Center for Community Advancement, with the full support of the City of San Diego and City of Tijuana and regional elected officials. This collective was created to amplify San Diego’s capacity as a global leader in human-centered design-driven innovation. The combined communities of art, culture, business, education, civic and design worked together in a multi-year, multi-national collaboration culminating in this night of solidarity for the joint-effort to win the coveted World Design Capital designation—a year-long city promotion program that would begin in 2024 and put the region on the global stage as a world-class innovator of economic, social, cultural and environmental design solutions for a better society.

“It’s not just about gaining the World Design Capital title,” said the Director of The Design Lab, Mai Thi Nguyen. “It’s about how we actually want to contribute and collaborate on multidisciplinary design innovation throughout the region, nationally and globally.”
Don-Norman

What is the Future of Design in 50 Seconds?

From Jnd.org & Don Norman: I'm developing a new talk: "21st Century Design: Addressing Major Societal…

Frontier Design Prize Announces Winners at World Design Cities Conference

Shanghai, September 15, 2022 | The Frontier Design Prize announced the winners of its inaugural edition during the opening ceremony of the World Design Cities Conference (WDCC).  Mr. QU Xing, Deputy Director-General of UNESCO, Mr. GONG Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai, Ms. XU Xiaolan, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology (China), along with leading designers, scholars and industry leaders, attended the award ceremony. The Frontier Design Prize (FDP) is a visionary, innovative, world-class design award established with the aims of encouraging design innovation, enhancing the impact of design in driving industrial transformation, and promoting the role of design in shaping a better world. A central program of WDCC, it is undertaken by Design Innovation Institute Shanghai (DIIS) with guidance from the Shanghai Municipal Government. 
Report: Military Remains Economic Bright Spot In San Diego

Report: Military remains economic bright spot in San Diego

Design Lab member Michael Meyer discusses San Diego's defense economy during Covid with ABC 10 News San Diego.

The coronavirus pandemic appears to have been no match for San Diego's defense economy, which a new report says keeps on growing.

The San Diego Military Advisory Council study says from the fiscal year 2020 to 2021, direct defense spending was $35.3 billion dollars, a 5.3 percent annual gain. Jobs grew 2 percent to nearly 349,112. In all, it made for a $55.2 billion dollar gross regional product.

"That means continued stability and economic prosperity for San Diego, buffered by, or provided by the military economy presence," said Michael Meyer, a professor at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, which researched the report.

The study points out that military spending impacts more than the people employed by the federal government or serving on base or active duty. Instead, there's a multiplier effect in San Diego, with nearly 190,000 San Diegans employed by private companies contracting with the defense department -- such as in programming or shipbuilding.

"Retraining for electronics, computers, aviation, the engineering fields, the technical financial fields. That's all valuable and an effective way of getting into the military economy," Meyer said.
Earth2 Project Challenges Vaccines

Earth2 Project Challenges Vaccines, 10 to 100, Ten Days to Vaccinate Everyone

"In collaboration with the University of New Mexico, the Earth2 project is helping to present a 10 day series of seminars on Vaccines and Vaccine Hesitancy, covering topics that range from vaccine-myths to Native American implications and special aspects having to do with other minority and LGBTQ communities, to hearing trusted voices." - David Brin, Author, Futurist, Public Speaker

"Solving the most complex societal programs involves a whole community approach. That's why I'm so excited about the Earth 2 Challenge to reach 100% vaccination which will make our society healthier and safer. But to succeed, we need everyone to participate." - Mai Nguyen, Design Lab Director, UC San Diego
Back To Top