2015 Furniture Design Competition

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has launched a Furniture Design Competition.

Objectives

The key objectives of the design competition are:

• To attract designers into the industry, thus creating a pool of designers to serve the industry.
• To promote product development and differentiation.

The competition will concurrently address the following objectives:

• To elevate the image of the Furniture Manufacturing Industry in South Africa, and position the local industry and enhance its competitiveness locally and abroad through new product development and product differentiation.
• To grow the industry’s competitiveness.
• To re-position the South African Furniture Industry.

Competition Categories

Category A: Final Year Tertiary Students
The 2014 Furniture design competition focused on the students and targeted all tertiary students. Due to different levels of skills the students would have acquired it is difficult for the students to compete at the same level. The current competition will only be limited to the final year students.
There will be five finalists from the category who will exhibit at the Design Indaba and three winners who will get prizes as indicated in the section below.
Competition Category B: Established/Professional Designers
As mentioned in the introduction there is a shortage of designers and there is a need to attract and promote talent in this space. The competition will be opened to this category in order to promote design amongst the established designers to be profiled and be able to place them in the forefront in furniture design.
The competition is designed in such a way that it will promote entrepreneurs and professionals in the furniture design to take their career forward and improve the design skills in terms and meeting the customer requirements.
South Africans are very proud of their culture and promoting the local designers would be key and the competition would drive the theme of using local materials.
Competition Theme
The proposed theme for 2015/16 competition is “Future Public Spaces“. Public services offered by the government such as airports, health institutions, municipalities, and other government departments that interact with the public in one way or the other. The competition theme seeks to provide seating/waiting solutions for public institutions. The theme for this year’s competition therefore, asks for user friendly and comfortable furniture designs that can be produced locally and has local material. The competition will provide a solution to various public spaces that will be manufactured locally and promote industrial growth in the furniture manufacturing sector.
The existing infrastructure in the public spaces is aging and the government has plans to build and renovate these public spaces. This is the time to start re-designing these many public spaces. This is the time when South Africa must decide the vectors that will serve the lives of people for 20, or even 50 years. The ideal designs for furniture used in such public spaces are important, and there is need to design new values that are in harmony with the changes in society.
Essential points for public furniture are safety, peace of mind, and ease of use, but another important aspect is diversity and coexistence. So with this theme of “Public Space”, we are looking for designs with the core concept of “furniture suitable for the coexistence of a variety of people”, rather than designs for specific people or conventional categories. Given the diversity of requirement of furniture in different public waiting areas the competition has been opened to both established and student designers. The competition is also aimed at benefiting the industry and influencing the products manufactured in the industry, by using the design skills.
Prizes
The five finalists’ products and the companies they worked with will be profiled by the dti. R50 000 worth of prizes will be split amongst the three finalists in Category A as follows.
1^st – Designer Profile in a magazine, and Solid Works Advanced Training worth R25 000
2^nd – Designer Profile & Solid Works Basic worth R15 000
3^rd – Designer Profile and Design tools worth R10 000
More details are available on the DTI website by clicking here. Entries close on the 31 August 2015.