A Special New Spark Design Award Announced
Wisconsin Eagle/10110617

NEW YORK - WisconsinEagle -- The Spark Design Awards is celebrating their 15th year by creating the AllSpark Award. It joins 10 other awards covering every design category and honors a whole body of work.

Spark's Chief Juror, Mike Nuttall, co-Founder of IDEO described his and the Jury's reasons for awarding this unique prize to the Google Hardware Design Team:

"Unlike the other Spark judges who judge one year and happily may return some years later, I have had the pleasure of being a judge for the last five years. This tenure has allowed me a unique perspective.

Over the past five years the Google design teams have submitted over thirty entries in the product category. From the innovative Daydream headset in 2016 to the delightful earbuds in 2020, these entries have included headsets, tablets, speakers, earbuds, keyboards, thermostats, controllers, door cams and cases. Many of these have been given awards. One outstanding aspect of all the entries, whether winners or not, has been consistency. Not the consistency that results from the formulative adherence to a design language but rather one that is the result of a shared and intelligent, thriving design philosophy.

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I don't know whether this philosophy is captured by a few words, pithy statements or whether it is a "feeling" or a design consensus distilled from years of experiment and conversation. However, if it can be summarized in a few words I would expect to see words such as approachable, simple, intelligent and surprisingly modest.

We are giving this new, special design award, maybe the first of its kind, not to an individual designer, but to design teams, not to a product, environment or concept, but to a body of work. A body of exceptional design spanning the last five years."

When presented with the award, Ivy Ross, Vice President of Hardware Design for Google stated "I am thrilled that the Spark Awards have acknowledged the work that my team and I have done with this special honor. It is very rewarding to see that our process is successful in transferring a unified feeling across a diverse group of product categories, adhering to our design philosophy, and being recognized by the Spark judges."

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As Spark Founder Peter Kuchnicki described it, "The jury nailed it in terms of how intentional the Google process is, with a consistent design esthetic, doing what is right for each product while making sure that their principles come through. One of those principles is how things feel. In fact, Google has developed a product impression method, used before and after they design, as a tool to achieve tangible and consistently high design standards across all products. Bravo Google Design!"

Get more information on these special Designs and many others in the Spark Galleries at www.sparkawards.com

Spark is currently accepting professional and student entries into the 2021 competitions in every design specialty.