International Design Awards Announce 2011 Winners; 3 Designs by RKS Honored

(Los Angeles, CA)  The RKS design team was awarded three IDA awards this week - First Prize for KOR’s Aura, Third Prize for the Orion-18 (Levelstar/APH) and an honorable mention for Nuance (DenMat). Aura is KOR Water’s latest and most affordable sustainable hydration alternative, the Orion-18 is a smart new Smartphone optimized for blind users, and Nuance is an innovative composite syringe for dental professionals.

The International Design Awards celebrates the world’s most visionary designers and promotes the appreciation of design worldwide, honoring designs for excellence in originality, creativity, execution and overall impact.

Connecting the Blind to the Digital World

Design Magazine (CIDA) April 2012

Check out China’s Design Magazine this month (Titled Extra-Ordinary Life) for a feature on the development for the Orion-18, and learn about RKS’ collaboration with LevelStar and APH to empower the blind with a smartphone designed to meet their specific needs. You can learn more about Design Magazine and CIDA (China Industrial Design Association) here, or download the article as a PDF.

Life Technologies and DenMat Announce Red Dot Awards

2012 Awards Received for Revolutionary Ion Proton™ DNA Sequencer and Innovative Nuance® Dental Syringe

March 21, 2012 - RKS is honored by the recognition received for our recent design collaborations with Life Technologies for the revolutionary Ion Proton™ benchtop sequencer, and with Den-Mat® Holdings (formerly Discus Dental) for the innovative Nuance® composite syringe. Both designs were recognized in 2012 with the prestigious Red Dot design award, conveyed for high design quality and designs that distinguish themselves for excellence.

Design Collaboration

Orchestrating Design Collaborations: Think Like a Family

The current issue of dmi Review tackles the topic of design collaboration, examining the benefits of collaborative design and exploring effective options for managing the collaborative process.  RKS’ Harnish Jani and CEO Ravi Sawhney contributed their professional point of view on the critical topic, co-authoring a feature entitled “Orchestrating Design Collaborations: Think Like a Family,” which shares a globally-recognized analogy to help guide managing modern design collaborations. 

Copies of the issue and article are available here.

Designed In USA

The ‘Designed in USA’ brand certification mark is a new identifier and brand enhancer for goods, services and environments designed in the United States. It is now available for free use by members of the design community, business community and by leaders championing the design profession.

‘Designed in USA’ was created by RKS to raise awareness of American design in all its forms, capitalize on perceived value, provide competitive differentiation and encourage optimism. Design’s various disciplines (product, service, architecture, interior, interaction, communication, etc.) are a vital humanistic tool increasingly shaping the world. And the U.S. design profession is a global leader that helps create more successful products and services by boosting consumer attraction and experience, driving innovation and innovation processes, stimulating job creation inside and outside manufacturing, and much more.

StageSource L3t Rocks Artists’ Expectations

It is a challenge for the performing musician to choose the perfect high-performance loudspeaker system because over the course of a career they play different styles, instruments and venues.  StageSource L3t is a simple, powerful and compact integrated live sound solution uniquely built on Line 6’s innovative technology platform and design. Innovative technology inside and an intelligent design outside enable a single speaker enclosure to provide best-of-class performance in multiple live sound functions, and the result is the most versatile and scalable loudspeaker ever imagined for musicians that stands-out within the crowded category. To learn more about StageSourceL3t visit Line 6’s website here or see what the media are saying here.

Unity Home Theater Wins Innovations Award, Impresses at CES Debut

Unity is a revolutionary new home theater solution and winner of CEA’s prestigious Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Award. It provides a simple, elegant, high-performance answer to the difficult questions consumers face in building Home Theaters that fit their lifestyles.

With design a core part of In2Technologies’ market-entry approach, the Unity Home Theater was developed in close partnership with the RKS design team, including both the industrial design and strategic brand development. The collaboration helped In2Technologies’ to realize their vision of a simple, elegant Home Theater product that would meet the aesthetic requirements…

RKS Honored with Seven GOOD Design Awards

(Chicago) RKS was honored this month to receive Seven Good Design Awards across the medical, electronics, and personal categories of the prestigious awards competition. Honored designs ranged from laboratory automation solutions to reusable water bottles, a new smart phone for the blind, to a mobile-optimized ventilator and an improved dental extrusion syringe.

Founded by Ray and Charles Eames, for more than 60 years GOOD DESIGN has bestowed international recognition upon the world’s most prominent designers and manufacturers for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality, and for stretching the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary product and consumer design.  The awards have been conferred annually by the Chicago Athenaeum since 1950.

A New Star Takes the Stage

RKS Design and Fender Musical Instruments Corporation today announced the debut of Gig Stand, now available at music retailers nationwide. With its small size, collapsible but durable construction, and weighing little more than the average lead cable, Fender® Gig Stand is perhaps the decade’s most refreshing innovation in guitar stand mobility. The sleek and sturdy foldable design prevents damage to valuable instruments while saving artists time and precious ‘case space.’ A distinctive departure from bulkier instrument stands with trapeze-like construction and screw tighteners, Fender® Gig Stand is the perfect attendant for every musician, and now has a back-stage pass to join the entourage everywhere.

See more on Dexigner.

Kor Aura Wins 2011 iF Design Award

RKS’ most recent design collaboration with long-time partner KOR Water, the Aura(r) hydration vessel, was released this year and has already been recognized with a 2011 International iF Design Award.

Aura is the lightest and most affordable offering in KOR’s line of premium eco-friendly hydration solutions, retaining all the key design attributes customers have come to love from the brand. Winners were determined by and international jury of design experts, and the competition was again hosted by iF International Forum Design GmbH, part of iF GmbH. Open to manufacturers and designers, the annual iF Product Design Awards honor all areas of product design, and have become a globally recognized seal of design excellence.

2011 Spark Awards Announced

The 2011 Spark Awards were announced this month by Executive Director Peter Kuchnicki and RKS is honored to be recognized with two winning designs—an overall competition winner for Nuance™ and a Bronze Award for our new smartphone design for the blind.

RKS’ design for Discus Dental (Philips) was an awarded design solution that helps dental assistants perform their jobs more effectively, while saving time and money in the process of extruding Discus’ new universal composite used for tooth repairs and fillings.  The Orion-18 is a new smart phone designed for the blind community, that will soon bring the world to people’s fingertips with the help of great design and integrated features in one wireless solution.

12th Annual National Design Awards

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum celebrated outstanding achievement in design this week with it’s 12th annual National Design Awards Program. RKS is proud to have been recognized by the National Design Awards for the firm’s recent portfolio of work in product design, and honored to be a 2011 finalist following the firm’s first entry into the competition.

The National Design Awards were conceived to honor the best in American design, and the program works annually to demonstrate the importance of design while increasing awareness of its impact on the quality of daily life. “The work of this year’s National Design Awards winners represents extraordinary solutions to the design problems central to the landscape of daily life, from how we dress, shape our personal and private spaces, frame communication and interact with the world at large,” said Bill Moggridge, Director of Cooper-Hewitt.

RKS Exhibition in Sao Paulo

CEO Ravi Sawhney shared some photos from Brazil of the RKS Exhibition, which will be on display for the next six weeks at the Panamericana Escola de Arte e Design.

Sawhney is speaking this week as part of Ciclo de Conhecimento (Cycle of Knowledge) in Sao Paulo and Curitiba. For additional media/photo coverage of the event, click here.