swissnex San Francisco plays host to the Design Preis Schweiz (Swiss Design Award) exhibit on its premiere stop in North America.
Join us for the opening of an exceptional event showcasing the best of Swiss design and for a high-caliber talk, moderated by IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge and featuring prominent figures of design both Swiss and global.
Held every two years, Design Preis Schweiz is a product of the Design Center Langenthal. It is a prestigious happening in the Swiss design industry, encouraging innovation, serving as a stimulator for market-oriented design ventures, and presenting design as a factor of market success.
Innovation-fueled design and design-fueled innovation are emphasized through 5 award categories: Market, Newcomer, Research, Swiss Textile Design and Swiss Product Design.
As shown in San Francisco, the exhibit features groundbreaking works by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Nose Design, COMA Amsterdam/New York, Beth Kottonau, Martin Woodtli, and many more. It focuses on industrial design, with potent asides in fashion textile and graphic design, and shows a keen bent on supporting innovation and sound direct-to-market approaches- swissnex San Francisco
Bio
Yves Behar
Yves Behar is the founder of the San Francisco design studio, FUSE Project.
Behar is focused on humanistic design and the "giving" element of his profession, with the goal of creating projects that are deeply in-tune with the needs of a sustainable future, connected with human emotions and enable self-expression. For Nicholas Negroponteʼs One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, fuseproject designed the worldʼs first $100 "XO" laptop aimed at bringing education and technology to the worldʼs poorest children. Yvesʼ commercial projects set out to be equally impactful as exemplified by the Herman Miller LEAF Lamp, the Aliph Jawbone and, most recently, Y Water.
Behars work has been the subject of two solo exhibitions and resides in the permanent collections of international museums worldwide, including MOMA and the Musee dʼArt Moderne/Pompidou Center.
Frederic Dedelley
Born in 1964, Frederic Dedelley received his education in Product Design at ECAL in Lausanne and at the Art Center College of Design (Europe) in La-Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland.
Since 1995 he heads his own design studio in Zurich, focusing on products, furniture and interiors. Also a Professor at the University of Art and Design, Basel (2001 - 2008), Dedelley has been awarded several distinctions for his work, including the Max Bill - Georges Vantongerloo Foundation Prize in 2000 and the Swiss Design 2004 award.
His work on exhibition and museum designs in Switzerland includes "Swiss Design, désir design" for the MUDAC in Lausanne, "Oui!" for Expo.02 in Yverdon-les-Bains, and several projects for the Museum of Design in Zurich.
His work on the St. Theresia and Neumünster churches, both in Zurich, received considerable attention as well, with the Neumünster project nominated in the Interior Design category of the latest Design Preis Schweiz / Swiss Design Award edition.
Pierre Keller
Recognized as one of the best design schools in the world, the Lausanne University of Art and Design, known as ECAL, owes its meteoric rise to a director who is invariably described as intimidating, irreverent or charismatic.
For some, Pierre Keller has probably done as much to revitalize the image of Swiss design as the invention of the Swatch. With his untiring commitment and his often unconventional but successful approach, he has succeeded in creating an institution that has an influence well beyond the borders of Switzerland.
Just as Pierre Keller's lack of formality and his epatant statements are received by the general public, so too the college's projects, with their emphasis on the practical, have caused a sensation. The notable feature of these is that distinguished designers and successful companies take part alongside the students. In an exemplary way, Pierre Keller brings design and the business world together. His latest exploit – the relocation of ECAL to a new site in Renens – was also something quite out of the ordinary.
“Design schools are the most important centers for the production of ideas”, says Paola Antonelli, the design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who describes Keller as “a tornado of ideas, an irresistible force in the world of design.”
Thomas Liebe
Born in 1965, Thomas Liebe received his training as Industrial Designer at the Zurich College of Art and Design and founded his own company, Ad Rem Design, in 1996.
He specializes in design for the packaging, medical tech ware and coffee machine industries, while sharing his knowledge via a teaching position in Product Development at the University of Applied Sciences of the Canton of Bern. Liebe has been particularly keen on developing his design partnerships in China, this since 2004. He further extended his activities through the creation of an Idea- and Marketing firm in Switzerland, Traritrara.
Liebe’s work has received numerous awards over the past twelve years, including repeated honours from both the Swiss Packaging Institute (SVI) and the World Packaging Organization (WPO).
William Moggridge
Award-winning designer Bill Moggridge is a founder of IDEO, one of the most successful design firms in the world and one of the first to integrate the design of software and hardware into the practice of industrial design.
He has been Visiting Professor in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, Lecturer in Design at the London Business School, member of the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, and is currently Consulting Associate Professor in the Joint Program in Design at Stanford University.
Moggridge's career has had three phases; first as designer, then as a manager of design, and now as a communicator, working as a writer, graphic designer and video maker. His fascination with design, and with what people want from everyday things, has given him a broad view of the information revolution.
Heidi Wegener
Heidi Wegener, born in Zurich in 1947, has been the Curator of the Design Preis Schweiz since 2002. In 1989 she was appointed Administrative Director at Zurich's Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst [College of Art and Design, now part of the Zurich University of the Arts], a position she retained until taking up the curatorship of the Design Preis.
Before that, Wegener held executive positions in the Industry sector of the Elektrowatt Group, where she made a significant contribution to a number of innovation and development projects.
Yves Behar, an industrial designer, argues design must give "contemporary answers" to current issues, such as energy efficiency and technological integration.
He believes these trends speak to global, not national, audiences.
People lack innovative minds. To see an innovative product the mind has to be prepared to make the leap from a realization of the ordinary to the realization of the innovative. There is only one notch between those two.
Most people are two or more notches away from recognition. To them, the watch is ugly.
