One of the most distinguished and highly regarded international design competitions is held each year by Industrie Forum, iF. Established in Germany in 1953, iF is among the oldest independent design institutions in the world, formed when a group of industry representatives and the Hannover Trade Fair Company created a trade association to promote ‘good industrial form’. The new association looked back to the Bauhaus movement, which sought to combine the ethical with the aesthetic, for its guiding principles and it has built on this foundation with ever increasing success.
Winning By Design
Awards
WINNING BY DESIGN
The Tilia Obsidian Cutlery range has now received three of the most prestigious international design awards: the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award in 2017, the 2018 German Design Award and, most recently, 2018 iF Product Design Award.
iF follows the same guiding principles today as it has done since 1953:
- To identify, support and promote good design
- To raise awareness of design among the public and the role it plays in our lives
- To help companies integrate design into their long-term strategies
- To safeguard the role of professional designer and boost awareness for this job profile
- To effect social change through design
- To support talented young people and create a public platform for young designers
More than five thousand entries from over seventy countries are submitted every year for the iF design competition whose extremely high standards mean that the competition is fierce. This, along with the status of the competition itself mean that an iF award is a badge of international recognition:
iF DESIGN AWARD has long become a symbol for excellent form, for aesthetic quality, and for user-focused, ergonomic and efficient design in all disciplines, by companies around the world. (iF world Design Guide)
For customers, of course, such an endorsement is a good indication that Studio William is a brand to be trusted.
At the iF Design Exhibition, on Hongkongstrasse in Hamburg, “outstanding innovations which been recognized with an iF award,” are displayed across two floors and one thousand, five hundred square metres of space. Three separate segments are exhibited each year. The third segment in the current exhibition, (running from October 4 2018 -17 February 2019), includes Studio Williams Tilia Obsidian range.
WHAT MAKES TILIA OBSIDIAN AN “OUTSTANDING INNOVATION”?
The Tilia range is named for the Tilia family of trees, more usually called Lime trees in the UK. Tilia is especially graceful and it has a tendency to hybridize naturally.
Crafted from stainless steel, slender, flowing and elongated like the tree itself, the design is a hybrid of geometric angles and organic lines. It is also a hybrid in another sense.
The result of a kind of marriage between east and west, the Tilia design combines the ergonomic features of the chopstick with the more easily manageable planes of western cutlery.
In the Tilia Obsidian range, the darkly luminous titanium finish both confers extra durability and evokes the hard lacquer finishes of the far east. It is this exceptional beauty, combined with the design features of the whole Tilia range, which gained it international recognition from the iF award judges and which means it will be part of the Hamburg exhibition until February 2019.
Hamburg is a thrilling city in its own right. The iF exhibition presents the truly remarkable and groundbreaking in design. So for anyone who loves to travel and who also loves good design, (in the word of the iF’s own website), this exhibition is, “a must-see”.