Audi Innovation Award announced at Dubai Design Week 2016

At the opening of Dubai Design Week, Audi Middle East announces their first design award for the Middle East. The ‘Audi Innovation Award’ is aimed at regional up and coming designers to stimulate design research and to highlight innovative ideas that will change the future. The purpose of the award is to act as a design and technology industry motivator in the GCC and Levant regions for design innovation.

On their fifth year of partnership with Dubai Design Days, Audi Middle East are launching this competition at Dubai Design Week for designers in the Middle East to create innovative design solutions that demonstrate  ‘significant positive change’ around the theme ‘Alternative’.

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 theme for the first Audi Innovation Award, Enrico Atanasio, Director of Audi Middle East said “We chose the theme ‘Alternative’ as it has a direct relation Audi’s strategy towards ‘Electrification’ and forward thinking and 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”. 

Audi is committed to focus even more closely on the environmental impact of our cars along the value chain. For that reason, zero-emission drive units in electric cars are as much a feature of our agenda as is the advancement of hydrogen fuel cells. We are therefore working on eco- friendly production methods, integral logistics chains, and a comprehensive

Recycling concept and new non-fossil fuels. We have also started up the first pilot plants that capture climate-damaging CO²and use surplus wind power to produce synthetic gas.

The Audi Innovation Award competition invites designers to present innovative solutions that observe and improve upon any of 5 key areas of focus: lifestyle, healthcare, mobility, education and urban public spaces, such as streets, plazas, parks and their furniture.

The ideas submitted may be inspired by nature or from manmade objects and the winning design will best integrate these solutions to be used in exciting new ways to provide a positive change that benefit our lifestyle, healthcare, mobility, education or the urban environment in the Middle East. The submission must be a developed idea that considers application, materiality, durability, target user, and lifespan. All designs must demonstrate an environmental awareness and careful approach to energy use.