2018 SEGD Global Design Awards: Celebrating Design that Connects People to Place
WASHINGTON— Winning projects in the 2018 SEGD Global Design Awards were announced on June 9 at the 2018 SEGD Conference Experience Minneapolis.
The 37 winning projects span a range of topics, disciplines and verticals, from an ancient underground temple experience in London to specialized wayfinding for a neurodegenerative disease center in Stuttgart to a university athletic center in Los Angeles. What all of the projects share is their effective use of design to communicate values, tell stories and create a strong sense of place.
150 Media Stream, designed and built by McCann Systems, was among this year’s Merit Award winners – chosen from among 338 submissions of experiential graphic design projects from around the world. The exclusive design called for custom fabrication of 89 vertical LED blades, and cannot be found anywhere else on the globe.
The Best of Show award was received by Refik Anadol, Media Artist and Director of Refik Anadol Studio, who lead the winning project design entitled “Archive Dreaming,” which was a collaboration with SALT Research for an exhibition at SALT Galata, an art gallery in Istanbul, Turkey. The complex and striking interactive digital experience is fueled by cutting-edge developments in machine learning and 1.7 million documents from the Ottoman Bank Archives and Museum that result in an immersive installation that reframes memory, history and culture for the 21st century.
The 2018 Sylvia Harris award was awarded to a residential wayfinding system called “The Red Stairs” developed by students at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. The project was part of an ongoing research and design initiative, “Open Your Space,” which explores how design intervention collectively shapes the public realm.
“The submitted projects are the best of the best from around the world,” says Christina Lyons, professor and chairperson of the Graduate Exhibition & Experience Design program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York) and Jury Chair for the 2018 SEGD Global Design Awards. “With seven major practices areas for entry, the variety of projects is vast, and as the traditional silos between practice areas continue to blur, we are increasingly seeing innovation in experiential design.”
In addition to Lyons, the 2018 SEGD Global Design Awards jury includes eight multitalented and internationally acclaimed designers:
- Brian Brindisi, Senior Associate, Firmwide Brand Design Practice Area Leader at Gensler (New York)
- Kathy Fry, Principal at Mayer/Reed (Portland, Ore.) and SEGD Board Member
- Jeff Grantz, Director of Creative Technologies at DCL (Boston)
- Allan Haley, Consulting Typographer & Writer (Georgetown, )
- Sasha Ichoonsigy, Graphic Designer at the Houston Zoo (Houston) and student winner in the 2017 SEGD Global Design Awards
- Joe Karadin, Executive Creative Director at TESSELLATE (New York)
- Valentin Spiess, Chairman, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of iart ag (Basel, Switzerland)
- Ellen Bean Spurlock, Brand Communication and Design at Little Diversified Architectural Consulting (Arlington, Va.)
The jury evaluated projects in seven categories that represent the core of experiential graphic design practice: Digital Experience Content, Exhibition, Interactive Experiences, Placemaking and Identity, Public Installation, Strategy/Research/Planning and Wayfinding.
Images, descriptions and team credits can be found in the SEGD Global Design Awards section of SEGD.org. Past winners dating back to 1998 are also available in the archives.
About SEGD
SEGD (the Society for Experiential Graphic Design) is the multidisciplinary, global community of professionals who create experiences that connect people to place. Find out more at www.segd.org.
3M was the Presenting Sponsor of the 2018 SEGD Global Design Awards.
