Hasta La Ideas

All images courtesy of iF Design Awards

This past weekend saw the first comprehensive iF Design Awards night at Munich’s BMW World, which hosted the presentation, dinner reception and late-night afterparty as well as an ongoing exhibition of the 100 Gold Award winners. While the awards program itself has been going strong for nearly five decades now, this is the first year that all four categories of the iF Awards were announced at one time, in a single awards night that was scheduled in conjunction with the first annual Munich Creative Business Week.

In fact, the gala on Friday, February 10, marked the first time that tickets to the iF design awards presentation were available to members of the general public, and (sub-freezing temperatures be damned) the singular BMW World—the storied automaker’s stunning event and exhibition space—saw upwards of 1,700 guests in all.

Additionally, the Gold Award-Winners will be on display in the atrium of the museum—which is remarkable in and of itself, home to the largest dynamic LED installation in Europe, some 1.7 million individual LEDs in all—until February 26. (They will be further exhibited at CeBIT in Hannover, Hamburg’s HarborCity and in Haikou, China, later this year.)

The product design category was, as ever, the largest of the four, comprising some two-thirds of the total number of entries and proportionally as many gold awards (60 out of the 100 total). While we agree with the jury‘s selections of winners from the 863 iF-approved selections (from a total field of 2,923 entries), we’d like to highlight just a few of our favorites.

I’m surprised we didn’t pick up on the Arkcanary II Acoustic iPhone speaker when it was released last year, but we echo the jury’s comment that the funky speaker is “somehow charming and humorous.”

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