Innovation as significant positive change.
Audi Middle East, in partnership with Dubai Design Week and Design Days Dubai, has launched Audi Innovation Award, its first design award for the Middle East.
The purpose of the award is to act as a design and technology industry motivator in the GCC and Levant regions for design innovation and, each year, recognize this region’s up and coming designers and the design research and innovations that will change our future.
Innovations will be judged on the ability to demonstrate a ‘Significant Positive Change’ around the theme ‘Alternative. The winner will be announced at Design Days Dubai 2017 in March and will be awarded financial support, a trip to the Audi factory in Germany, along with mentoring and business incubation to develop and ensure a protected design.
The competition closes on 17 January 2017 and proposals can be submitted to the Audi Innovation Award website http://audiinnovationaward.com/.
Shortlisted candidates will be given $2,500 towards the presentation of their concept model that is to be exhibited at Design Days Dubai in 2017. The prizes to the winning designer of the Audi Innovation Award will include a trophy and a trip to the Audi factory in Ingolstadt, Germany to experience the automotive design journey at their company headquarters. In addition to this, Audi Middle East will award $25,000 worth of consultancy to cover items such as IP registration, legal counselling and business development. The progressive automotive company will work closely with their partners at Design Days Dubai and Dubai Design Week to provide design advice and mentoring to ensure the winning design is protected and given every opportunity for further development.With only a few days to go until the end of submissions, the number of registrations for the Audi Innovation Award has been steadily mounting.
The competition seeks to empower regional designers while archiving annual intellectual progress in the Middle East region. The award acts as a mark of outstanding achievement, celebrating the exchange of ideas and investing in the designers of tomorrow to empower a future family of change makers.
Speaking about the reaction of designers to the competition so far, Cyril Zammit, Fair Director of Design Days Dubai said, ‘We are impressed to see the amount of talented designers who have registered their interest in submitting their ideas for the Audi Innovation Award and with only four weeks to go, we are expecting to see some fantastic creativity in the designs submitted.”
Enrico Atanasio, Brand Director of Audi Middle East commented “The judging panel will meet in January to review all the entries and decide the winning three innovative designers, who will then be invited to make a model of their idea to be shown at Design Days Dubai in March 2017. I have no doubt that it will be a very close competition.”
Audi chose the theme ‘Alternative’ as it has a direct relation Audi’s strategy towards ‘Electrification’ and forward thinking and it celebrates the outstanding achievements Audi is making in this field for alternative energy vehicles. The ‘Alternative’ theme for this year’s Audi Innovation Award aims to stimulate outstanding integration of existing design solutions into new facets of everyday things. As in the case of the automobile, the transformation of the combustion engine into electric is the perfect example of synthesizing accessible knowledge to better suit our current environment and ecosystem.