For a creative mind the act of designing something can be interpreted not just as a mere aesthetic exercise, but also as the result of a process triggered by the possibility of finding new solutions to specific problems or by the urge to improve some aspects of our lives.
Since their launch in 1994, the Henry van de Velde Awards have been celebrating such creative minds. This Belgian event honours indeed good design, showcasing national and international Flemish designers, enterprises, products, projects and services that have a positive impact on the economy and society.
The awards are divided in categories - Communication, Design-led Crafts, Ecodesign by OVAM, Efficiency, Everyday Life and Healthcare - with three extra awards, Lifetime Achievement, Young Talent and Company. Besides, the public's favourite product receives the Henry van de Velde Award via an online vote.
Flanders DC awarded the prizes in BOZAR, Brussels, today and we were pleased to hear that The Post-Couture Collective won the Ecodesign Award by Ovam.
This project started by Martijn van Strien in 2015 tackles issues of fashion excess and overconsumption and won this award for suggesting new methods for producing sustainable, affordable and personalised clothing (remember the post we did about them last year? Check it out for further info about this design collective).
Yet there are further intriguing projects in the other categories as well, some of them textile-based: the Design-led Crafts award went indeed to Tableskin, tactile tablecloth and napkins designed by Lore Langendries and made by Verilin, a family business from Kortrijk, in the South West Flanders.
Though it looks like a perfectly normal tablecloth, this piece has some conceptual connections: the textile represents indeed a digital image of a reindeer hide, rendered in a natural fabric.
The idea is to play with the attraction/repulsion dichotomy behind hair (think about luscious hair Vs hair/hairs found on the table...). The design also juxtaposes primitive times when animal hides were used by hunters, to the world of luxury and wealth that often fetishises furs.
This prize this year is linked with the Company Award that went to Verilin for its luxury collections of table, bed and home linen.
This 60-year-old company is specialised in made-to-order products, and receives regular orders from Michelin-starred chefs, artists and designers. The company has its own in-house production, weaving, cutting, embroidering and manually finishing the fabrics in its own workshops (the only external step is pre-processing, that is softening and pre-washing).
One of the reasons why this company was awarded the prize is its strong urge for innovation: thanks to its investments in ground breaking, innovative research such as new looms, Verilin opened up intriguing weaving possibilities, like their Jacquard machines that can weave photographic images using 12,000 threads at once, producing extremely detailed results via complex patterns.
Architects looking for intersting materials for their projects may find them in the "Dubio" bricks, designed by Roel Vandebeek for Nelissen Steenfabrieken. Based on the N70 brick, Dubio is characterised by shadow lines that create an illusion of two or three thin stacked bricks, an aesthetic and cost-cutting idea that benefits both bricklayers and architects (the weight of the total number of bricks required is 30% less than that of standard bricks, resulting in a 30% reduction in transport costs) and that won the brick the Efficiency Award.
The compact design of his practical "Stubs" - four colourful and stackable stools for Labt that together form a whole - won Frank Ternier the Everyday Life Award. Apart from being functional, minimalist yet futuristic (when stacked they look a bit like wooden versions of R2-D2...), the stools come in lovely combinations of colours.
One important aspect of the awards is the fact that they are deeply linked with healthcare and wellbeing: design and engineering agency Voxdale won indeed the Healthcare Award with the Colli-Pee created for medical device company Novosanis.
The Colli-Pee allows for a highly concentrated first catch of urine sample which contains richer amounts of DNA, RNA and proteins which improves the accuracy of diagnostic tests.
The Theomatik, a tray devised by Theo Willen, who is volunteering in the St.-Ursula rehabilitation center, with the occupational therapists of the Jessa Hospital rehabilitation center and created by Boonen Design Studio, got the Public Award. The Theomatik is a system that helps people who aren’t able to use both arms to easily open items like butter dishes, jam jars or sugar.
The Communication Award went to a project that perfectly combined the past with the future: the Plantin-Moretus Museum, the first museum ever on the UNESCO World Heritage list, preserves the two oldest printing presses in the world. For its reopening in 2016, the museum turned to Kastaar, an analog printing factory in Antwerp, founded by graphic designers An Eisendrath and Stoffel Van den Bergh.
Kastaar conceived an original plan for promoting the reopening of the Plantin-Moretus Museum: it ventured out onto the streets of Antwerp with two mobile printing presses to bring the museum directly to people and designed its own museum shop collection based on 16th-century woodblock illustrations from the archive featuring animal, botanical and religious prints.
The Young Talent Award went to industrial designer Sep Verboom for his sustainable alternatives to traditional industrial production that unite people and get them working together.
Verboom travelled in different countries, from the Philippines and Indonesia to Brazil, to work with talented and skilled artisans and designed fan lamps made from recycled ventilator hoods and woven rattan, and came up with pieces made with marine ropes or with fibres from the Carnauba tree.
Last but not least, Bart Lens won The Lifetime Achievement Award: a designer of buildings and objects, Lens applied his skills to a diversity of projects - houses, shops, hotels, industrial buildings, restorations and a series of objects including lighting fixtures and furniture.
He is well-known for being the curator of Bokrijk, a large project involving the restoration of this open-air museum based in Limburg that weaves the past, present and future of craftsmanship into a single story.
The Henry van de Velde Awards have changed over the years along with the evolutions in the design field, and hopefully they will contribute to bring more positive transformations on a larger scale. It would indeed be brilliant to see certain ideas developed by this year's winners adopted by the fashion industry or by the healthcare system on a global scale.
You can learn more about the Henry van de Velde Awards winners and nominees in the free exhibition in the foyer at BOZAR, Brussels (from 31 January until 15 April 2018).
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