BE OPEN - Young Talent Award

LONDON, March 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --



Awards  ceremony  with  presentation  of  designer  trophies

at INTERNI - FEEDING NEW IDEAS FOR THE CITY

Expo Hall, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Festa del Perdono 7

Monday, April 7^th, 6pm

In  the  presence  of  the  jury 

Shay Alkalay (Raw Edges), Giulio Cappellini (art director of Cappellini), Giorgio Galli (design director of Timex Group), Sofia Lagerkvist (Front), Jay Osgerby (Barber & Osgerby).

Shortlisted  candidates

Elie Ahovi (France), Anton Alvarez (Chile), Benjamin Graindorge (France), Philippe Malouin (Canada), Kwangho Lee (South Korea), Humans since 1982 (Sweden), Studio mischer'traxler (Austria), Daniel Rybakken (Norway), Dennis Parren (Netherlands) and Yuri Suzuki (Japan).

A leading, international design industry jury has selected 10 candidates from a long list of 40 to compete for the world's newest design prize, the BE OPEN Young Talent Award.  Since the essence of this project is to promote and integrate young designers into the working world, the jury is comprised of industry professionals who can support the winners in their career development.

The Award is part of BE OPEN's Inside the Academy strand, their innovative approach to supporting creative education from study through to professional practice. The award is an annual grant of €24,000 to support one designer a year's day-to-day living expenses, helping them develop their work at this critical early stage in their career.

Described as an 'incubator for young talent', seeking out designers who have only recently completed their studies and are making their first steps in a design career, the award will allow the winner to continue to work at their own pace, experiment with both practical and conceptual projects and discuss their ideas for production with key contacts supplied by the BE OPEN community, including manufacturers, laboratories, industry professionals, experts and mentors.

The focus for this year's award is industrial design, with its remit to improve on functionality and form.  Three winners will be selected: the main award recipient, the Yelena Baturina prizewinner - a candidate chosen from the shortlist by BE OPEN's founder - and the Web Choice, for which the public can vote online until 17 May 2014 at https://www.facebook.com/beopenawards. A series of exclusive prizewinner trophies, designed on the theme of the egg, to symbolise emerging talent about to hatch, are being created by three of the jury members.  Barber & Osgerby's design for the main award is an egg-shaped bronze shaft; all-women practice Front's design for the Yelena Baturina award is a dinosaur egg; and Raw Edges' design for the Web Choice award is a wooden egg in an ironic trophy style eggcup.

Work by the shortlisted designers, as well as biographical footage, will be revealed through an ingenious installation of around one hundred birdcages, in different shapes and sizes, some old, some new, suspended in the cloister of Università degli Studi di Milano.  Half of them will contain screens showcasing the designers and their work.  The birdcage format is being used to highlight the contrast between the freedom of creativity and the limitations of the real world.  Here the doors to the cages will be left open to show that BE OPEN's Young Talent Award helps unleash creativity, removing some of the constraints of day-to-day living for promising, young designers.

For  updates  on  BE  OPEN  see: 
http://www.beopenfuture.com
facebook.com/beopenawards
twitter.com/BEOPENFUTURE
instagram.com/beopenfuture
youtube.com/BeOpenCreative

SOURCE BE OPEN