Tag: Inspiration

We're proud to announce the results of the 2026 Core77 Design Awards! The winning projects showcase an incredibly wide range of subjects, materials, technologies, processes and approaches. We truly appreciate all the time and effort that went into these projects, as well as the expertise and consideration of our jury teams in their evaluation of all the entries.Apps & Platforms

The 2026 Design for Social Impact Professional winner is Otter Newborn Warmer, a project by Design that Matters for MTTS Co. Ltd.. The design team included Timothy Prestero, Greg Dajer, Gerd Schmieta, Steffen Reschwamm, Trong Vo, Jim Pelletier. The Otter is a newborn conductive warmer is designed specifically to prevent hypothermia in low-income countries, featuring an intuitive touchscreen interface, seamless polycarbonate construction for infection control, and an integrated battery that provides uninterrupted warming during power failures. Conceived to be "hard to use wrong," the Otter addresses one of the leading contributors to neonatal death in resource-limited settings by delivering effecti

Taking the 2026 Professional honors in Furniture & Lighting is Pantheon from Turf Design. Pantheon is a coffered ceiling scape from acoustic solutions manufacturer Turf, featuring a systematized design with crisp edges and corners where open and closed tiles work seamlessly together—accommodating mechanical elements and lighting without trimming. Designed for commercial spaces that need to control unwanted noise without compromising aesthetic

The Tools category this year recognizes a Student winner: MX Surgical – Tactile XR Surgical Training by Niklas Andreasen at the Umeå Institute of Design. MX Surgical is a mobile, scalable XR training system that combines multimodal surgical tool replicas, modular pads, and mixed-reality overlays to enable realistic, repeatable surgical practice across different settings—directly addressing the shortage of hands-on training opportunities for surgical residents. Unlike existing XR training tools that rely on generic controllers and neglect the physical reality of open surgery, MX Surgical is designed to build the motor skills and muscle memory esse

The 2026 Professional winner in the Commercial & Industrial Equipment is Concerto Platform, designed by Loft Design for Codetta Bio. The Concerto™ platform is an integrated, high-throughput biodetection system developed by Loft Design in partnership with Codetta Bio to address the fragmented, multi-instrument workflows that slow down scientific discovery in modern laboratories. By consolidating detection from a single sample into one seamless system, Concerto reduces the need for specialized expertise and manual data alignment—delivering uncompromising sensitivity while tackling the inefficiencies caused by understaffing and rising

The 2026 Sports & Outdoors Professional winner is Solo Steelfire Griddle, a project by Smart Design for Solo. The design team included Louis Filosa, Lulu Mills, Albert Kwak, Jane Fessenden, Will Merrill, Vasily Romanov, Ariel Meltser. The Solo Steelfire Griddle is a premium outdoor cooking system designed by Smart Design to redefine how people cook, gather, and entertain in their backyards. The design stands apart in a crowded market through a distinctive oval form that makes the griddle a social centerpiece, much like a kitchen island at a party. Informed by in-home research showing that griddling is as much about hosting as coo

Taking the 2026 Professional honors in Speculative Design is Mare Regula by Céline Minkyung Park. Mare Regula is a speculative design project that materializes the invisible disciplinary systems sustaining Jeju’s haenyeo (women divers) community—a UNESCO-recognized cultural heritage celebrated for solidarity, whose internal power structures have never been visually documented. Through two weeks of immersive fieldwork living alongside haenyeo and months of collaborative research, designer Céline Park uncovered how the romanticized narrative of communal harmony obscures sophisticated

The 2026 Professional winner in the Sustainability Category is Holy Carp, the world's first plastic-free, home compostable soy sauce dropper. Made from molded plant fiber and designed to disappear, Holy Carp directly replaces the ubiquitous plastic fish-shaped soy sauce packets used worldwide that cannot be recycled and easily escape into the environment. Designed by Angus Ware, Zachary Hanna, Mitchell Brown, Jeffrey Simpson, and Vincent Tsang of Vert Design for Heliograf, Holy Carp is an emblematic chal

The 2026 Autodesk Fusion Prize goes to Otter Newborn Warmer, a portable conductive warmer that prevents and treats newborn hypothermia in low-resource hospitals. The product features an intuitive touchscreen interface, seamless polycarbonate construction for infection control, and an integrated battery that provides uninterrupted warming during power failures. Conceived to be "hard to use wrong," the Otter addresses one of the leading contributors to neonatal death in resource-limited settings by delivering effective warming that rural hospital staff can operate reliably without specialized training.The Otter Newborn Warmer was created by Design that Matters (DtM), a small American nonprofit that partn

The 2026 Core77 Design Awards Editors Choice prize goes to Peaks, a modular and adaptable seating system designed by fuseproject for Moooi. Inspired by the angular landscape of the Swiss Alps, Peaks "transforms the traditional, static sofa into a flexible social terrain" by combining triangular foam modules with fabric hinges, which "allows a single person to reconfigure the seating environment in seconds, shifting from a solitary workspace to a communal conversation pit." The design ditches the traditional front-and-back orientation, enabling 360-degree interaction and accommodating