12 April,2011 10:39 AM IST | | The Features Team
For Garima Aggarwal Roy, Meera Narula, Kulveer Bhati, Anish Dasgupta and Utpal Pande, the Home Review Designquest has been a dream come true! An initiative by Home Review magazine, the Designquest aims at giving young designers and architects a chance to experience world class design first hand.
This year, over 1300 designers uploaded their ideas and work on the Designquest website. Over 60,000 people from 120 countries visited their profiles and voted for them. After 45 days of three grueling rounds, five winners of Designquest emerged.
And as the grand prize, they will now travel to every designers' dream destination Milan to attend the iSaloni, a world famous furniture and design expo and visit other design destinations in Europe.
The mind game
This year's theme of Designquest was to get young designers to Open Their Mind. To help them do so, Designquest created a website presenting a platform for exchange of ideas and conversations around design. While many such sites exist abroad, almost none showcase Indian design. In just a few weeks of opening the website, it was buzzing with activity. The end result being the five winners who will travel to Milan.
But going one step further, Home Review and its title sponsor Hansgrohe have added another incredible experience to this trip. Hansgrohe, one of the world's leading bath fittings brand with designers like Patricia Urquoila and Philippe Starck, will be flying the winners to their headquarters in Germany to get an exclusive tour of the facilities and interact with the team at Hansgrohe.
When asked about their partnering Designquest for the second year in a row, the managing director of Hansgrohe India, Dr Nicholas Matten, said, "Our tie up with Designquest is intended to raise the bar of design in India. And what better way to do it than address the youth, the future of design in India?"
The winning stretch
These five winners had to beat some intense competition to get here. In the finals, held at Blue Frog recently, 15 designers presented their ideas to a jury made up of architects and designers. Said Nuru Karim, founder director, LIVE Laboratory for Interactive Visionary Environments, Mumbai, "It was a learning experience for me as much as it was for the finalists! The future of Indian design is alive and kicking." We agree, Nuru!
