Spark Design Awards

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BACK AT IT
Sorry folks– Not enough blogging going on around here! We’ve been consumed with an extremely busy competition season. It started getting hectic in September, with the Spark exhibition in Shanghai, during the Cumulous Design Educators Conference.

Then, wham, we were slammed with all the pre-Spark deadline publicity–well, you probably experienced a bit of it. The Spark Jury finally convened in late October, and we all had a swell time. The Jury was Monday. The Awards Celebration and exhibition of winners was the following Friday. In between, all of the staff came down with a vicious bout of food poisoning. So things were a little out of sorts! Anyway we made it happen, the Spark party was fun and 2010 was a wrap.

Well, almost. For our final act, Spark Director Clark Kellogg and I went on a whirlwind tour of Korea, Taipei and Guangzhou. The Guangdong Industrial Design Association graciously invited Spark to mount an exhibition of the 2010 winners. The occasion was the GD Industrial Design Week. So this was both an honor and a pleasure.

The GDDW Themes were Talent, Fusion, Industry and Cooperation. We were part of the Fusion Pavilion.

And the finished Pavilion glowed with your winning Sparks.

A pioneer of Chinese design, Prof. Tong Huimin, Director of the Guangzhou Academy of Art, came by to welcome us to GZ. Prof. Tong is a great friend of Spark and we always enjoy seeing him again.

Next stop, Seoul, Korea– at a hot spot in a cold town. DesignKorea 2010 Expo was a lovely show, honoring design from the G20 Summit nations. We were delighted to meet with Nara Suh and Song Hyo-sik from the KIDP, the producers of the event.

A very interesting final stop on this tour brought us to the Taiwan Design Expo in Taipei. This was a show with lots of great student work, some incredible fabric and fashion design and some nifty electronics. Taiwan Design Center’s Vivian Wu and team filled us in on next October’s International Design Alliance Congress, and Spark’s contribution–hoping for something fresh and… Sparkly, please! (This show will be a doozy of a networking event. Don’t miss it.)

So ended a momentous year–and we lived through it! Back home we gave thanks, shoveled snow and rested up for the next round. All Best!