Red Dot Award: Product Design

The assessment process

Successful jury session: Adriana Monk about the evaluation process

At the end of February, the Red Dot Jury came together to select the best products of the year. During the assessment process, the jurors looked at each individual entry and tested the objects in great detail. Only products, that won them over with their good design, were awarded a prize. Apart from the formal quality, the experts attached importance to criteria such as degree of innovation, functionality, longevity, ergonomics and self-explanatory nature. When the jurors were convinced of an object’s design, they could choose whether it should receive an Honourable Mention for a well-thought-out detail solution, a Red Dot for high design quality or the highest distinction of the competition, the Red Dot: Best of the Best. During the jury session, Red Dot talked to jury member Adriana Monk and let her review her experiences during the assessment.

Inspecting the products

During the conversation, the owner of “Monk Design” accurately described the selection process, which is divided into three parts: “We took our time at the beginning and everybody walked through the whole selection. By the way, it is an incredible array and a lot of hard work has gone into this. I have huge respect for the whole team that prepared it all, because it makes it very intuitive. You see an item, read about it and you try to understand what it is about.”

Discussion within the team

After the first round, which was mainly aimed at getting an overview of the entries, the jurors assessed the products of their area of expertise in teams of three: “Then, we went through the selection as a team and started to debate. But we went through it on a very casual way where we would say ‘This is good, this maybe could be a Red Dot’, but we didn’t say immediately ‘This is out or this is in’. We didn’t discuss too much initially, but did a first selection.”

Choosing the best products of the year

The final decision is taken in the next step. “The second time around is when we had the big debate about whether something should have an Honourable Mention or whether something actually even deserves to be in the list. Having seen all of the products, it made it nice to feel what deserves attention and thereby the design qualification ‘Red Dot’,” the expert goes on to say. “At the very end, we tried to find the best of the best of that group that we have already narrowed down.”

Result announcement on 25 March 2019

The results of the competition will be announced from 25 March 2019. Due to the well thought out selection process, the strict judgement criteria and the excellent expertise of the jury, consumers can rely on the good design quality of the winning objects. ”It is a great way of evaluating the entries because you feel that it is the most honest way of assessing somebody else’s work,” concludes Adriana Monk.

Information on the Red Dot Award: Product Design