How Everything Began—the Origin of iF

iF was founded after World War II, when the German export sector was still struggling to overcome the burden resulting from the Third Reich. In order to create a brand-new start, the business sector put forward the concept of “good form,” which had evolved from Bauhaus’s combination of ethic and aesthetic considerations. During the post-war era, this concept was deepened by the Ulm School of Design, which was established by the Allies of World, with the goal of conveying the new image of Germany through product design. In 1953, Philip Rosenthal, the Federation of German Industries (BDI) and the Hannover Trade Fair company founded a new institution (Die Gute Industrieform e.V., or Good Industrial Form in English), which was later renamed as Industry Forum Design (Industrie Forum Design e.V. in German, abbreviated to iF), with the participation of, among others, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, a pioneer in German industrial design. Different from other design institutions at the time, iF was initiated not by the government, but rather, by the business sector, and the objective was to set up an annual procedure to select “products with aesthetic qualities” and award and display them in the post-war Hannover Trade Fair. Such a selection procedure later evolved into the internationally recognized iF Design Award, which aims to acclaim excellence in design.

 

iF at Present

In 2001, the iF institution established the iF International Forum Design GmbH (Ltd.), which adopts an enterprise approach to its operation, including running the organization and hosting iF Design Award. The iF institution, on the other hand, started to focus more on its mediating role between design and business. Today, in several areas of design, iF has become a globally leading network, with its reputation coming from iF Design Award. Currently, for enterprises and design firms worldwide, iF Design Award is one of the few awards with remarkably high value and reputation. Such high reputation is especially present in Europe and Asia, while it continues to expand in Latin America and North America, too. For participating enterprises and design firms, an iF award logo represents the best in form, aesthetic qualities and usability. At the same time, new categories, such as architectu, interior design and service design, have also been successfully incorporated into iF Design Award.

Award receivers usually use the iF logo for their packaging, advertisement, exhibitions and show rooms as a way of product promotion. As enterprises with unique design philosophy participate in the award competition, they also intend to seek answers to questions such as “Have we been able to maintain good design?” or “How do independent experts evaluate our new design?” In addition, iF Design Award often plays an important role in meetings where high-level managers, marketing, sales and R&D departments of an enterprise discuss design strategies. As a result, the iF Design Award logo allows winning enterprises to stand out among competitors in different markets.  

iF’s Support for Young Design Talent

     Due to its reputation of integrity and credibility, iF has become one of the independent design institutions with the longest history in the world and has clearly differentiated itself from its competitors. Since 1953, the iF institution has begun to abide by the following six principles:

§ Evaluate, support and promote good deisgn

§ Raise public awareness regarding design and the role of design in life

§ Help enterprises incorporate design into their long-term strategies

§ Maintain the role of professional designers and enhance the understanding about the profession of designers

§ Realize social change through design

§ Support talented new designers and create a public platform for young designers

 

  iF aims to support design major students. In 2003, iF Concept Design Award was introduced as part of iF Design Award, and in 2008, it became itself an independent award. In 2011, iF established a non-profit enterprise: iF DESIGN TALENT GmbH (Ltd.). This enterprise actively supports design majors, and every year, students can participate in a variety of design talent awards. In recent years, iF has organized many student design awards and activities, including:

§ iF Concept Design Award

§ Lebens(t)räume Competition

§ iF Public Value Student Award

§ Hansgrohe Design Prize

§ Haier Design Prize

§ Bodyfriend Design Prize

§ Richard Sapper Rubbercup

§ iF + Cumulus Projects

 

 In 2012, the number of participating entries of iF Concept Design Award surpassed 10,000 for the first time. Since then, there have been over 12,000 participating entries from 70 countries worldwide on a yearly basis, and through these competitions, participating students have learned from each other, kept in contact with each other and cultivated broad perspectives to face future challenges. Unlike other organizations, iF charges zero participation fees from students and provide them with reward sums. As iF believes, it is our obligation to support new design talent, which also represents our investment in the future. To us, it is our responsibility to support students and help them fully prepare themselves for industry needs, whether they decide to become employed or self-employed designers.   

The Transformation of iF Design Talent Award

     In 2015, iF Concept Design Award was renamed as iF Student Design Award. The reason for the renaming was mainly because students in the past often mistakenly enrolled in iF Design Award, which was for professionals, while professional enterprises or designers often enrolled their concept works wrongly in iF Concept Design Award, which aimed at students. As a result, we have changed the name of this award from iF Concept Design Award to iF Student Design Award.  By putting the word “student” into the name of the award, we aimed to make things clearer for participants so that they could enroll in the right award more easily. In 2017, after some system modification of the enrollment procedure, different awards could then be better differentiated. Upon that moment, we once again updated the name of this award. The new name, iF Design Talent Award, now has very clear connection to the name of the organizer, iF DESIGN TALENT GmbH (Ltd.).

     Over the past years, we have been thinking about organizing this award twice a year. The purpose is to facilitate students’ learning through competition and allow them to share their results from the classroom with the entire world while at the same time reviewing themselves. On the other hand, compared to once a year, organizing the award twice annually offers the chance to receive more quality works. Therefore, upon the renaming and system update this time, we decided to give this idea a try.

 iF Design Talent Award never set up themes for competitions, so students from different design areas could put forward any design concepts they wanted in order to participate. The award-winning works have conveyed issues and come up with solutions concerning students from different countries, all with great innovation and originality, and these works have all been gathered on the website of iF Design. The online exhibition on the iF website has preserved more than 110,000 design works since 1954, which is currently the largest-scale design exhibition online. It is not only a design website frequented by enterprises, designers, media, procurers and scholars, but also the best database for design research.

An important function of a database is to facilitate data search, so the establishment of data attributes and keywords is very crucial. In the past, iF’s online exhibition only allowed search based on the name and year of the award, so it wasn’t easy for a user to quickly find the needed content in such a large database. Therefore, iF invested a large amount of capital and human resources to rebuild its website, and at the end of 2015, the decade-old website was updated and renamed as ifworlddesignguide.com, which aims to be the best portal website in the design world. In response to the difficulty of searching for winning works, in 2014 and 2015, iF put forward a few pillars that they believed would contribute to the future Megatrend: social, cultural, economic, environmental and technological. The participating works of iF Concept Design Award would have to choose suitable pillars as their attributes. However, these attributes were not appropriate keywords for data search. As a result, when building ifworlddesignguide.com and providing more functions on the webpages for enterprises, design studios, designers and designer profiles, we started to consider the necessity of setting up themes for the competitions. By doing so, iF hopes to simulate the high standards facing students when they apply for a job today. iF seeks to challenge students more in order to better bridge their learning and working.

iF has made strenuous efforts in supporting design talent, but without the help of sponsors, we wouldn’t have done as much for young designers. Previously, sponsors have invited iF to organize student design awards, but starting from this year, we combine all these student awards and turn them into one single platform as a way to provide more opportunities to establish connections and networks. For example, the iF-organized Hansgrohe Design Prize and Haier Design Prize have been integrated into iF Design Talent Award as independent themes.

Every year, each of the two seasons of the award offers three to six themes for participants to choose from, and each theme will have a different group of experts to serve as jurors. After the winners are revealed and awarded, all the winning works will be announced on ifworlddesignguide.com. The six-month cycles and regularly updated themes allow us to keep ourselves up-to-date, and young designers can have more opportunities to react and respond to current issues and incidents of the world. At the same time, the new-generation designers and the business sector are more closely linked together, which provides young talent with a platform on which to show and express creativity. 

 

iF’s Future Prospects

  In terms of evaluating and promoting outstanding design, iF has come a long way. As an organization, iF serves as a gatekeeper for good design; as the organizer of the renowned iF Design Award, iF represents the criteria for excellence in design; as a partner in the international design community, iF is an active advocate who takes action and plays the role of commentator and supporter at every level. Our success lies in people, trust and the strong faith that the design community can keep improving every aspect of our daily lives.

     To many students, winning iF Design Talent Award opens up a bright future for their career by helping them find a job or encouraging them to establish their own business. In addition to continuing to organize iF Design Talent Award well, we expect to provide students with more support in the future regarding design talent cultivation and creativity incubation. To materialize the financial support for young designers, we need and look forward to more sponsorship. We will work closely with the business sector together and jointly create a bright future for young designers.