Professor Sang-Min Bae and his research team from the Department of Industrial Design in KAIST received one Silver award and two Bronze awards in the 2015 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). IDEA is one of the most prestigious international design awards awarded by Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) along with the Red Dot Design Award and iF Design Award. More than 1700 projects from all over the world were submitted in the 35th IDEA competition.

Professor Bae and his research team were awarded three awards from the 2015 Red Dot Design Award: the Best of the Best Award and two Design Concept Awards just last July. They succeeded in receiving three more awards from IDEA this year.

The Silver award-winning T2B (Trash to Bin) in the category of Social Impact Design is a trash bin that is made out of 850g of discarded papers. As it is made of pure recycled paper pulp, it costs under 5 dollars to produce and is waterproof for more than six hours. This design is environmentally friendly and it satisfies En 10789 safety standards. The advantage of T2B lies in its eco-friendly and economic characteristics.

The Bronze award-winning Roll-Di in the category of Home and Bath is a direction indicator for roll screen curtain users. It was designed to reduce the inconveniences of people who easily get confused with which strings of curtain to pull and frequently make the mistake of pulling the wrong string. Another Bronze award-winning design is Printing Solar-cell from the category of Outdoor and Garden. This is a cartridge module that prints solar cells using an ink-jet printer. This new design is made with an organic solar-cell cartridge and the merit of this design is that users can design and print their own solar panel with given guidelines.

Professor Bae and his team are working to solve various social problems by coming up with innovative and socially contributing designs. He explained that “I believe that the awards were given to us to encourage the works our team is doing for the socially deprived classes. We will work harder to use world’s best design for the under-privileged.”