World Design Rankings 2021 / A’ Design Award & Competition 2021 – 2022

The WDR – World Design Rankings announced January 2022, the Design Rankings of countries based on the number of designers that have been granted with the A’ Design Award, all in the name of further promoting a global design culture through exhibiting and supporting good design. China ranked as number 1 among the 114 countries and regions, followed by the United States of America, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Taiwan, Turkey, Germany, and Australia, which took the top positions in 2021.

The WDR – World Design Rankings aims to provide additional data and insights to economists and journalists regarding the state-of-art in design industry. The ultimate aim of the world design rankings is to contribute to global design culture through advocating and highlighting good design. The rankings aim to provide a snapshot of countries’ state-of-art and design potentials worldwide by highlighting their creative strengths, design weaknesses, and available opportunities. The “Design Business Insights” section provides a ranking of countries based on their success in diverse design fields and creative categories. Using the “Design Business Insights” section, media members and design lovers could discover leading countries for specific design sectors and get answers to their questions such as “Which country is best in industrial design,” “Which country is best in interior design?”, “Which country is the best in fashion design?” etc.

 In the 2021-2022 rankings, eight new countries were included for the first time in the ranking. To discover the complete list of countries included in the World Design Rankings and to see in-depth design business insights for each country, interested parties could check the World Design Rankings at http://www.worlddesignrankings.com.

World Design Rankings 2021

A’ Design Awards & Competition is the worlds’ largest annual juried design competition that honors the best designers, architects, and design-oriented companies worldwide.

In today’s post, we’ve rounded up some of the winner designs to help kick-start your submission!

Furniture Pavilion S Showroom by Rooi Design and Research

• Designers: ROOI Design and Research, Chief designer: Zuoqian Wang, Structural design: Song Wang
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “821 pieces of prefabricated market standard-size plywood are used as a primary construction material, enabling rapid assembly or disassembly on-site within 48 hours. The pavilion comprises stacks of modular plywood units that double as display coves, allowing audiences to observe the furniture from various angles. After the exhibition, the entire pavilion will be transformed into 410 sets of furniture designated for the nearby community.”

The Fifth Element Residence by Materia 174

• Designers: Mykhailo Ilchenko, Aleona Pryadko, Anna Hryb, Kyra Tymchenko, Victoriia Shevchenko, Aleksandr Dityatev and Olga Kovalyova
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “House for permanent residence of an adult married couple. Located on the edge of an urban village, the plot looks into the forest on two sides. The owner is a media person; one of the requirements is to ensure maximum privacy. The main tasks were to leave connection with nature, to fit a Spa with a 20 m indoor pool and a garage for 4 cars, and keep the building looking compact. There are living, dining, kitchen zones, 2 master zones with a short connection between all the zones in the main block.”

Perception Cafe by Haejun Jung

• Designers: Haejun Jung – Freelament
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Platinum A’ Interior Space and Exhibition Design Award
• Inspiration: As a branding and interior designer of this retail project, the brand name of the cafe, “Perception" gave strict inspiration to us. People usually feel something through their past experiences, which means very personal and private. Have you thought about that other people think or feel just the same as you had? We believed that this question is valuable to deal with this project. Then we started to touch on the norms of feeling at the cafe.

Xerolithi Residence by George Sinas

 

• Designers: George Sinas (Sinas Architects), Team: Maria Mamoura and Interior Decoration: Olga Ktena
• Winner Category: 2020 – 2021, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The main focus of the design was to create a house that blends in its natural environment. An environment comprised of steep dirt and gravel slopes, dressed with scattered wild thorny bushes and beautiful large rock formations. The most important existing elements were the short stone retaining walls, locally called xerolithies, created a long time ago for land cultivation purposes. These walls, usually not more than a meter in height, formed flat stripes of land parallel to the slope and extended along the entire surface of the hillside. The site with its xerolithies was the spark of inspiration.”

Fondazione Bertarelli by Edoardo Milesi

• Designers: Edoardo Milesi & Archos, Engineer: Marco Verdina (structures) and Engineer: Alessandro Nani (plants)
• Winner Category: 2020 – 2021, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The architecture of the concert hall, shaped according to its rational and poetic function, the task of letting instruments play, and the desire to convey emotions, listens and participates without disturbing; it is part of the orchestra and plays its role as a new musical instrument which improves the acoustics of the place. Aesthetic values are not perceived as added; they are part of the building and radiate from it.”

Taizhou Mansion Commercial Architecture by Feng Cheng

• Designers:Yuanfeng Xu, Shuo Xu and Qinggang Zhu
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award
• Inspiration: Because of the narrow site, the project was to create natural surroundings of the building and keep connections in-between. Due to referencing the Chinese garden, the walls give the project its own character, which lowed the messy environment’s impact and created many winding paths and framed beautiful spaces. For a building to have a strong connection to the rich surrounding nature, we made. In this way, the project has a quiet atmosphere that is rare in the center of the city.

 

Plover by Ray Ng

• Designers: Eravolution Limited & a group of THEi Students
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Platinum A’ Furniture, Decorative Items, and Homeware Design Award
• Inspiration: Free like a Bird With the ability to roam the earth and soar up into the sky, birds, are natural symbols of freedom. Capturing this free spirit of the birds and the duality of their solitary and social nature, Plover is a collection of chairs co-created by architect Eravolution Limited and a group of THEi product design students, either used individually or collectively for brainstorming, seminars, and co-creation. The Plover chairs may appear delicate, but they got everything one needs.

Sada Foldable Bike by Gianluca Sada

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• Inventor and Designer: Ing. Gianluca Sada
• Product Development Manager: Luca Scudieri
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Vehicle, Mobility, and Transportation Design Award
• Inspiration: Demanding mobility-related services has consequences on society: street congestion of metropolitan hubs is the everyday challenge commuters have to face and is a source and stress and delays. «You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.» R.Buckminster Fuller Promoting and enabling virtuous behaviors for smart mobility, intermodality, sustainability for the environment are the values driving Sada Bike

Integration Multifunctional Air Purifier by Lafa Industrial Design College

• Designers: Weizhi Cao , Anzhen Zhang , Hongrui Qi , Shan Ni , Shuwen Zheng , Xudong Zhang , Donglin Yang and Hong Cheng
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Bronze A’ Home Appliances Design Award
• Inspiration: In modern culture, the open space combination of kitchen, dining room, and the living room has become a favorite home environment. Therefore, the air purification of the space environment is essential. The combined design of lights and air purifiers reduces the use of actual space. The use of space on the ceiling, the combination of purification devices and lamps make the space layout more rational.

Flex Multifunctional lamp by ZhuoYi Fan

• Designer: co-designed and developed by the staff of the design team of GUANGZHOU PINGITAN CRAFTS CO.LTD
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Lighting Products and Lighting Projects Design Award
• Inspiration: Inspired by the scene, birds rest on a branch, jump and sing happily, rest quietly, and then fly away. This lamp imitates the birds’ activity process with the easily separated structures, making the household luminaire more flexible and functional. We select natural wood to develop products for the younger generation. It is light and portable to match the rapid shifts in space and time, suitable for the young’s free, dynamic lifestyle. We want to create a new user experience of lighting that is natural, affordable fashion with user-friendly techniques.

U15 Photographic Series by Tiago Marques

• Photographers: Tiago Marques and Tania De Pascalis
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Photography and Photo Manipulation Design Award
• Inspiration: The building U15, subject of Tiago and Tania’s photographic series, is located in a part of the new district of north Milanofiori, in Milano. Designed by Cino Zucchi Architetti, the structure is in a continuing relationship with the green design. The artists, inspired by the masterplan idea, take advantage of the shapes, colors, and materials of U15 to develop a photographic concept which wants to combine the building design with traditional nature landscapes.

Phoenix Tree Garden Tea Space by Qingfan Zhang

• Designer: Qingfan Zhang and Bo Zhang
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Some elements come from the reference to Suzhou classical gardens, such as the small arch bridge, borrowed from the static bridge in the net master garden, the stone paving on the ground borrowed from the linear stone paving of the bathing gull small garden. Designers designed and directed the stack of the red rock mountains. Several tea rooms with different views and feelings were made in less than 200 square meters.

HK Port Passenger Clearance Building by Aedas

• Designers: Aedas and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners as JV Designer and Keith Griffiths (Aedas), Max Connop (Aedas) and Richard Paul (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners)
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Platinum A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award
• Inspiration: The PCB is constantly filled with movement, with people arriving and departing by buses, cars, and taxis. It serves as a gateway for all those passing through it, providing Hong Kong with a new ‘front door’ celebrating travel and surrounded by water with views to a natural skyline of evergreen mountains and hills. The elegant modular roof form ideally lends itself to offsite prefabrication and has enabled an efficient construction process achieving a very high level of quality.

Faculty Architecture Education school by Patrick Schweitzer S&AA

• Designer: SetAA, Associate architect : EAACON, Construction : EGIS, Enterprise : CATIC and Landscape architect : Acte 2 Paysage
  
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The building uses two simple materials commonly found in the region: stone for the exterior envelope; and self-colored concrete for the interior. The building has small outward-facing windows and large inward-facing windows protected from the sun by roof overhangs. The upper section of the pyramids is truncated to bring in natural light and optimize ventilation.

Interpretation Centre of Romanesque Exhibition Centre by spaceworkers

• Designers: Henrique Marques, Rui Dinis, Rui Rodrigues, Rui Miguel, Sérgio Rocha
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Based on Romanesque architecture concepts in Portugal, the building aims to be a transitional element between the present and the distant past. The volumetric proposed contains the principles of unity within diversity, appearing under several volumes with different heights and dimensions, demonstrating the diversity that Romanesque buildings have left us. Therefore, each volume of ceilings reinterprets one of the roof types used in Romanesque architecture.

Studio Atelier11 Office by Hyunmo Park

• Designer: Park Hyunmo, Park Geunhyo, and Kim Dohyung
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Studio Atelier11 has the system with the line and grids that urban development has accomplished recently to the north and the organic system. The natural patterns are preserved to the south and located in the contact point that different city plans have.

House for Parents Residence by Masakatsu Matsuyama

• Designer: Masakatsu Matsuyama
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: As a traditional daily custom on this island, people gather and stay under large trees’ shadows. We aimed to create architecture that celebrates the region’s culture and re-emerges traditional life’s spirit on the island. The space under the large roof, supported by thin steel columns, provides a shady and cool, comfortable interior that suits the southern island’s severe climate.

Santos House by Fernando Abelleyro

• Designers: Fernando Abelleyro and P.Coles
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The need to promote a typological construction that enhances versatility and the constructive possibility that wood offers; in our country, it was never widely accepted as a reliable and noble construction material. It was necessary to generate a project which expresses the potential of this wonderful material. The inspiration was given by the context itself, given the search to articulate a fluid relationship between the interior and the exterior.

Rizhao Ocean Park by Tengyuan Design

• Designers: Zhao Guangjun, Xiaohong Li, and Huiying Yin
  
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award
• Inspiration: The Project is located in China’s coastal area, where the sun sheds its first light onto the earth. It is also the cradle of the sun culture of China. The project’s concept is inspired by the golden sea surface when the sun starts to rise, and the Project is designed as a salute to the generosity of the ocean and as a respect to the energetic marine life with the language of architecture.

Warm Transparency Clinic by Yoshiaki Tanaka

• Designer: Yoshiaki Tanaka
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The client requested a clinic where we can feel the warmth of wood. TSC architects tried to achieve a clinic with “Warm transparency” by using plenty of wood material for interior and exterior material. And TSC architects set the large wood eaves extended from inside the building to a tangent between the town with a traffic-laden street. The large wood receives the patients and generates a space where they can feel security even outside the building, symbolizing the town.

Registration to A’ Design Award & Competition 2021-2022 is open now.
Results will be announced on the 1st of May, 2022.