Eye on design

Be it a watch or a bike, innovation and quality in product design are a way of life in Germany. The country gives away numerous awards in this category and students are given equal opportunities with professionals to put forth their concepts every year (see box on page 42). The influences can be traced back to 1919, when Walter Gropius set up the Bauhaus school to create a ‘total’ work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. Hannes Meyer and the famed Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (known equally for his "God is in the details" quote as he is for that chair) continued the vision. It had a profound impact on subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography.

GN Focus takes a look at two different award-winning product designers, Hadi Teherani and Arman Emami. Teherani, creative head of Hadi Teherani AG design company, is well known for his successful architectural work with his Hamburg-based practice. He says that it is his wish "to make the design philosophy of a star architect come to life in the objects of everyday life, thus following in the tradition of Bauhaus". His unique sense of aesthetics and his feel for shapes, surfaces and proportion span interior design, furniture and lighting.

Born in Tehran, Teherani received his schooling in Hamburg and started his career as a fashion designer in Cologne before dedicating himself to architecture. His practice has branches in Moscow and in the UAE.

International recognition

This year, Teherani picked up a red dot award for +Artesio, a kitchen concept he jointly developed with German kitchen manufacturer Poggenpohl. The award-winning architect’s client list includes Armstrong DLW, Busch-Jaeger, Montblanc, Poggenpohl and Wall AG, and Zayed University, closer to home.

"As a designer and architect, I am dealing with the whole environment with the human being in between. Ecological concerns also play a major role," he says.

These factors have informed the creation of the first Hadi Teherani e-bike — a sporty, light, and triking creation that comes in a limited edition. The accumulator battery is concealed in an easily removable handlebar bag and can be recharged in the office or at home without any trouble. An iPhone can be integrated as cockpit with navigation and speedometer. "My bike is a bike for 20 years; the electric drive is a temporary support for everyday use, which also includes hills or long distances, thus considerably expanding its action radius. It echoes my design philosophy: classic, functional, timeless, unique and yet sustainable."

A different perspective

Likewise with Berlin-based industrial designer Arman Emami and his team. Since 2005, the firm has looked at everyday commodities from a completely different angle. "We have fully detached from any conventions to create design objects that are sensible and sensual at the same time," Emami says. "All technical details and aesthetics are connected discreetly through one guiding theme to continuously create new but familiar objects, which enrich and simplify the lives of its users over and again. In doing so, expectations, norms or standards are deliberately ignored to explicitly cross boundaries and to question best practices. It is rather the combination of expert knowledge and curiosity that provides goal-oriented but never boring or ordinary products."

His design philosophy embraces simplicity and functionality. In this matter, he looks at forms, colours and haptic experiences in the same way notes, sounds or sequences work — they provide compositions with an individual soul and character.

"Product design is more than rationality, functionality and technology. It is created upon instinct, idealism and the concern for the new and different. Good ideas are based upon the aesthetic embodiment of a to-be solved problem via design: a poetry of shape forming, that is," says Emami.

Like Teherani, his work has won accolades from the International Design Forum, red dot, Good Design Japan and US, Focus Open and the Bundesdesignpreis Deutschland. One of his latest creations is the Neolog OS wristwatch. "The challenge was to show time as quantity, like a hourglass. It visualises the growing and passing of time during a day — but more intensely than numbers. Time should be represented in a new but, at the same time instinctive way, to enable the user to read it easily. This display uses a common image in a new context: the familiar arrangement of the dice pips allows fast and instinctive reading. Every minute, the pips create a new and interesting graphic. This way, time becomes art."

The ergonomic design of the watch and the straps angled at 70 degrees to the display ensure a perfect fit. The case-back is made of high-quality 316L stainless steel with an antistatic silicone strap.

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Big prize ideas

The new BraunPrize 2012 invites aspiring design students, professionals and enthusiasts across the world to submit their entries by March 31 next year. Concepts can address big, global problems or find simple, ingenious solutions for small, daily routines.

With a strong focus on sustainable solutions for everyday life, the prize will introduce Sustainability Awards next year in addition to the traditional Global Design Awards. Total prize money has been raised to $100,000 (Dh367,000).

Meanwhile, iF concept design awards also welcome ideas from students and graduates of all the different study programmes in the fields of design (product, fashion and communication design), architecture, marketing and engineering. “Any young, new designer who faces up to the challenges of tomorrow, who thinks about intelligent opportunities to apply contemporary design strategies and who has the courage to see things in a completely different way has a good chance of winning the iF concept design award 2012,” say organisers. An international jury of experts will distribute prize money of €30,000 (Dh152,175) among the entries selected as the best. Entries must be submitted by January 10 next year.

— Gulf News Report