About the year 2016
Swiss Design Awards' exhibition
Swiss Design Awards 2016 in Basel
The Federal Design Commission is happy to present the 13 winners of the 2016 Swiss Design Competition in Basel, in the context of Design Miami/Basel and Art Basel. Exceptional financial requirements have led to the re-duc-tion of the number of prizes this year, making the jury‘s task more complex as the quality of the projects and the diversity of research presented at the competition certainly required more awards! One should underline the excellent level of the selected projects and how difficult it is to choose one proposal at the expense of another within the diversity of fields that make up Switzerland’s design world nowadays. The awarded works are distinguished by their precision and inventiveness, the professional and contextual competences, as well as the practices’ dynamism that displaces the cursor of our expectations. One should notice the strong presence of photography within the 2016 selection along with supreme creative disciplines such as graphic design, product design and, since several years, fashion. The exhibition and its accompanying publication are an important platform for numerous young talents who found here an initial form of diffusion of their practice; the prizes reward those who, after the jury process, have interested, delighted or disturbed a group of experts. Now, at the first public viewing of the show, it‘s time for visitors to extend this discovery and share it with their own networks.
Lionel Bovier, Chair of the Federal Design Commission
Competition
Organised annually by the FOC since 1918, Switzerland's leading national design competition aims to create platforms that help the competition winners advance their careers and present their work to a wider audience.
The prize money for the Swiss Design Award is a monetary sum of 25,000 Swiss francs. By recommendation of the Federal Design Commission, this year 13 designers were honoured in the categories of photography (4), graphic design (3), fashion and textile design (3), products and objects (2) and scenography (1).
