The Golden Pin Design Award is hosted annually to exhibit the award-winning works of each year, showcasing excellent designs from both Taiwan and worldwide. The 2021 Golden Pin Design Award Exhibition kicked off at the Taiwan Design Museum, Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (in Taipei) on Nov. 30. This year’s exhibition features the nearly 200 entries that were selected as winners of this year’s Golden Pin Design Award and Golden Pin Concept Award under the theme of “UPLOAD”, and also integrates immersive exhibition space and interactive experience to encourage audiences to share and exchange their design imaginations. The exhibition will run until Mar. 6, 2022, so be sure to check it out!
The 2021 Golden Pin Design Award ceremony was planned by Isaac Chen, a famous producer who has planned many Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards and Golden Horse Award ceremonies, and uses as its theme the idea of designers uploading their works—UPLOAD—to pay tribute to designers by way of indicating that the creation of each and every design enriches the world.
To echo this year’s theme, Ling-li Tseng, the curator of this year’s Golden Pin Design Exhibition, transformed the exhibition into a platform where designers can upload their wonderful designs. Tseng and Serendipity Studio have organized many well-received exhibitions over the past few years, including “The Tales from where the Land Emerged” at the 2021 Creative Expo Taiwan – Hualien, which created a majestic and spiritual immersive experience to showcase Hualien’s local history, nature, and human culture and has garnered numerous domestic and international awards, including Germany’s Red Dot Design Award of the year and Japan’s Good Design Award. This time, Tseng and Serendipity Studio will once again be treating visitors to an awe-inspiring viewing experience through their organization of the Golden Pin Design Award Exhibition.
Regarding the Golden Pin Design Award Exhibition’s theme of “UPLOAD”, Tseng explained that creations often start with individuals’ personal ideas and that the process of conception and design to completion resembles the uploading of data onto networks, allowing such ideas to be connected and communicated with the outside world and become integrated into the macroscopic whole. The Golden Pin Design Award therefore provides an “uploading” platform for designers from various fields to introduce their creative designs, allowing more people to explore the ingenuity and value behind the designs and in turn fostering exchanges to inspire more ideas. To accord with the theme of “UPLOAD’, the exhibition space designed by Shi-ching Yang’s key visual utilizes black backgrounds, discontinuous white lines, and LED light strips to create a surreal atmosphere that conveys the idea of data transmission, while the hidden ladder-like codes, the ladders in the center of the exhibition hall, and the staggered display stand in the exhibition hall add richness to the overall space.
The exhibition breaks away from previous competition classification-related mechanisms and focuses, presenting the following six exhibition dimensions: “Problem solved” explores how designs can be used to find solutions to solve contemporary society issues and inspires people to do the same; “New heights in beauty” introduces highly aesthetic works to illustrate how designers can strive for excellence in aesthetics; “This is what life can be like” discovers new things in life, and demonstrates how designs can change people’s daily lives and create new lifestyles; “Redefining place” displays how the world defines and reinterprets the idea of locality to reveal the endless creative potential of the world; “Imagination is limitless” inspires people’s imaginations, sheds light on how designs and people no longer have a one-way, usage-based relationship, but rather a two-way, interaction-based relationship that sparks users’ imaginations; and “To the future we go” focuses on works with a strong sense of the future to enable visitors to see future possibilities.
Through the six exhibition dimensions, this exhibition hopes to connect the visual relationships between physical objects together, allowing the creative ideas of works to generate interdisciplinary interactions. For each exhibition dimension, the exhibition curatorial team designed a series of interactive question cards asking questions, such as “Which work makes you want to travel to the location introduced by the work?” and “Which design answers questions that were on your mind?” in hopes that by answering these questions, visitors can form new reading perspectives at the same time as they are appreciating the works.
Additionally, a co-creation wall was set up at the end of the exhibition hall for visitors to “upload” their ideas inspired by the exhibition, and the calligraphy paper strips are printed with random images to facilitate interactions and convey the concept that designs are more than just creating something out of nothing, but are also a process of observing and analyzing phenomena and proposing original ideas. This exhibition is therefore one where the ideas conveyed by works interact with the thoughts and ideas of visitors, in turn inspiring the visitors and recreating the design process characterized by the constant making of improvements.
Highlighted exhibits
This year’s exhibition features nearly two hundred entries that have previously won the Golden Pin Design Award and Golden Pin Concept Design Award, breaking the record for the number of exhibition entries displayed. The entries come from regions such as Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, Germany, India, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Many exhibition entries designed by Taiwanese firms have caught the attention of the public with their innovative designs, including PEGATRON’s “MAGNETO dual-screen laptop,” an item that uses a unique magnetic induction-based sliding keyboard combined with a full-frame dual-screen and a touch panel to enable users to switch between multiple interfaces or different modes easily and offer a higher-performance laptop experience; and PEI HUA DESIGN’s “CVMTM carbon fiber belt trail bicycle” that revolutionizes modern bicycle designs and application technology, evokes a sense of geometric beauty through the staggering of extremely thin and extremely thick steel pipes, and engenders new urban bicycle aesthetics through the creation of minimal frame designs via careful welding.
The award-winning products from other countries are equally mesmerizing, including Casio Computer’s “D’z IMAGE’DERMOCAMERA DZ-D100 & DERMOSCOPE DZ-S50,” which applies a dermoscope and camera designed using original, self-developed image processing technology to take close-up or full-view shots of affected areas and with its lightweight and easy-to-operate characteristics helping to improve the accuracy and efficiency of dermatology diagnoses and treatments.
The 2021 Golden Pin Design Exhibition─UPLOAD will run from Nov. 30, 2021 to Mar. 6, 2022, and audiences are invited to get a glimpse of this year’s award-winning designs from Taiwan and around the world. This year’s award ceremony will take place on the evening of Dec. 4, during which the winner of this year’s Best of Golden Pin Design Award as well as two other “Special Annual Awards” (social design, circular design) will be announced to encourage more designers and companies to invest in solving social innovation and environmental sustainability issues. Additionally, to support designers in realizing their creative goals, this year the Golden Pin Concept Design Award is collaborating with the Farglory Foundation to co-host the “Special Annual Award─Farglory Special Award”, where the winner will receive a NT$200,000 cash prize. The award ceremony will be broadcasted in both Chinese and English live in the exhibition’s official YouTube page. For the latest information, please visit the Golden Pin Award’s official website and social media platforms.
About the Golden Pin Design Award Group
The annual Golden Pin Design Award is the longest-running international design award that celebrates products or projects expressly created for Chinese-speaking communities, offering entrants an unprecedented opportunity to prove their prowess in the world’s largest market.
The Golden Pin Design Award Group is executed by the Taiwan Design Research Institute and organized by the Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs acts in an advisory capacity.
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International Media Enquiries
Golden Pin Design Award Team
Taiwan Design Research Institute (TDRI)
Wendy Wen, Press Coordinator
press.gpaward@tdri.org.tw