Mario Bellini, architect (President), Milan / Chew Moh-Jin, technologist, Singapore / Lieven Daenens, director Design Museum Gent, Belgium / Carla Di Francesco, director PARC, Roma / Carlo Forcolini, past-president ADI, designer, Milano / Norbert Linke, designer, Germania - Belgio / Emanuele Pirella, author, Milan / Richard R. Whitaker, architect, USA.

Modular shelving system inspired by architectural components, with T-shaped aluminium posts, perforated track, and sheet steel shelving in a patented shape. Big is caracterized by a high front lip and a crisp corners. The clear-cut shape is combined with the precise study of the details that facilitate anchoring and mounting procedures.

The first example of an independent image that was nevertheless at the same time integrated with the official image of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Look of the City constructed a visual interface that now involves the whole city. Distributed across the 130 square kilometres of the city’s urban fabric, the project is articulated in a series of iconographies, installations, fixed and dynamic, corporate identity, all featuring the same vermilion red colour (cinabro).

A lengthy study of production technology has enabled furniture elements to be made of two-coloured materials using rotation moulding. The process of introducing the polyethylene in the form of powders coloured in the mass in two phases differentiates the embossed external surface from the smooth internal one, which is revealed when the sides are subjected to the final cut, executed by a five-axis numerical control machine.

This stand constitutes a reinterpretation of the trade fair stand’s display function. In addiction to the products presented, the loadbearing structure itself – made of wood with curved profiles made of aluminium extruded through a custum-designed matrix – testifies to the company’s abilities and communicates its potential.

This watch’s six-piece steel case is made using an innovative process that gives the product a hollowed look, revealing the coloured resin perimeter ring at the side. This ring’s assembly is made possible by the tunnel configuration of the bracelet attachments, wich are fixed to the top of the case, and of the key plaque and crown protection.

With its flexible wiry body and flat head, this reading lamp transfers the advantages of the Chip on Board Led technology into the domestic environment: comprising several groups of multicoloured diodes, the illuminator generates a warmer light than that usually cast by Leds and also has a long working life, while contributing to energy saving. The direction of an amber filter can be adjusted using a small lever to correct the lamp’s colour yield and make it more like that produced by halogen sources.

As part of the “Me-Too” collection designed especially for children, this multifunctional chair-cum-toy enables three different uses depending on its position: high, low, or like a rocking horse. The handle is a safety element and makes transport easier.

Focusing on the problem of safety and urban mobility, the design team concentrated on small-scale vehicles and developed this twoseater car. As the name (which means “nest”) suggests, Nido surrounds and protects the driver using three main elements: a chassis comprising a deformable front part and a rigid cell around the occupants; a shell that contains the driver and the passenger and acts as a sled that can slide horizontally along a central rail; two impact absorbers that act to dissipate energy. In case of a frontal collision, the vehicle absorbs part of the energy in the deformable front area of the chassis, while the rest makes the passenger compartment slide away from the point of impact and enables its gradual, controlled deceleration for the occupants. The colour scheming also emphasises the elements concerned with safety.

This first application of the patented R606 polymer tests out its functional possibilities in a chair whose rigorous configuration is opposed to its soft material, applied to the interior support in a single stamp.

Built using lightweight materials, this cruise and regatta yacht features a continous plexiglas skylight that marks the low superstructure and illuminates the below-decks. The teak deck with square portholes is completely uncumbered, while the sofas and tables in the cockpit are all removable. All the below-deck areas feature a dominant use of carbon fibre, versatile space layouts and an alert eye for colour schemes and design details, such as the retaining rims around workshops and table in the gallery and the custom designed leather hold-alls for clothing.

One of Italy’s leading postwar architects, he belongs to that select group of talents that anticipated and eventually helped found Italian design. His work as a designer is a rare synthesis of economy of expression, mastery of formal language, and technological expertise, and it has helped define the nature of Italian design and uniqueness of its products. The award pays belated tribute to a master designer whose work has always transcended ideology.

His forty years and more as a design teacher, critic, historian and theoretician has provided several generations of design students and professionals with analytical and theoretical tools of exceptional usefulness and undisputed excellence. In op. cit., the magazine he founded and still edits, he has charted the evolution of Italian design from the 1960s to the present day in the light of parallel developments in art and architecture. His books have played major role in defining the disciplinary status of design.

Driven by a love of beauty, and in love with all things new, this exacting and methodical autodidact has turned his Catania store, dating from the early 1960s, into a beacon for Italian design retailing. Despite the drawbacks of his geographical location, his determination and courage as a retailer and advocate of good design helped foster awareness and appreciation of top-drawer manufacturers and products, Italian and otherwise, long before they achieved fame.

Gavina embarked on his extraordinary career as an endlessly inventive designer and Socratic midwife to talents other than his own in the early postwar years, when the word “design” was not yet a part of people’s everyday vocabulary. He was an endlessly curious man, permanently encamped outside or alongside the borders of existing ideas and assumptions, a lifelong devotee of innovation, always treading the borderline between art and design, ethics and aesthetics, industrial manufacturer and éditeur. He died in 2007, leaving a cultural trail which he himself blazed for others to follow.

His career has made him one of the great graphic designers of today. His depth of culture, responsiveness to trends in avantgarde art, and profound humanism, are a measure of the special kind of freedom that has carried him beyond the constraints of disciplines and fashion. His achievement is a valuable object lesson for today’s new media artists.

An architect in the more sophisticated sense of the term, as well as a precocious designer, in his long partnership with Afra Bianchin he has created some of Italian design’s best known icons. His keen interest in manufacturing processes, technological and formal innovation and, most of all, his ongoing quest for new uses of materials, have become hallmark features of Italian design itself. His designs, which combine tradition and innovation, are consummate statements of how creative freedom can be harnessed to rigorous method.

His sheer energy as a designer, entrepreneur and dealer shook Britain’s stuffy design establishment to its foundations in the early sixties. The shockwave then moved to France, the country he adores, with the opening of the Habitat store chain, whose selling techniques were as innovative as the products on sale. After losing control of his company on the Stock Exchange, he won success with a new range of products and his new chain of Conran stores. His exceptional talent made Sir Terence Conran the first British design professional to be awarded a knighthood.

His apparent rejection of all technology – a distinctive feature of his work – in fact conceals on ongoing quest for the right technology, neither more nor less. His design is the result of thinking about real, concrete problems, free from prejudice and theoretical postulates. According to Milá, who admits to never having been unduly interested in finding a workable definition of design, “the best design is what can be achieved using a bare minimum of elements.”