World Design Rankings 2020 / A’ Design Award & Competition 2020

Courtesy of A’ Design Awards & Competition

The WDR – World Design Rankings recently announced the 2020 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 108 represented countries, followed by the United States of America, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Taiwan, Germany, Turkey, and Australia, which took the top positions in 2020.

Two new countries are included in the 2020-2021 rankings: Macau (China) and Iraq. While Countries in the Top 10 have not changed. Hong Kong surpassed Great Britain, Taiwan, and Germany surpassed Turkey.

The WDR – World Design Rankings aims to provide additional data and insights to economists and journalists regarding the design industry’s state-of-art. 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 the state-of-art and design potentials of countries worldwide by highlighting their creative strengths, design weaknesses, and available opportunities.

World Design Rankings 2020

World Design Rankings 2020 / A’ Design Award & Competition 2020 – 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!

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.

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

Plover Multi Purpose Chair by Eravolution Limited and a Group of THEi Students

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.

37 Degrees Music Coffee Table by 37 Degree Smart Home Ltd.

Designer: 37 Degree Smart Home Ltd.
Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Furniture, Decorative Items, and Homeware Design Design Award
Inspiration: The wooden coffee table that can play music aims to enrich the user’s entertainment choices at home, especially in the living room. Imagine enjoying the music of high sound quality while having a nice cup of coffee.

Sada Foldable Bike by Gianluca Sada

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

Integration 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

Rizhao by Tengyuan Design - World Design Rankings

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 2020-2021 is open now.
Results will be announced to the public on May 1, 2021.

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