Back in April Mercedes-Benz and Wallpaper* invited design talent from six universities to take inspiration from the Mercedes-Benz GLK.
Read more about Mercedes-Benz GLK: The contest
Students from six top European designs schools, led by a team mentor, were encouraged to explore the GLK’s design vocabulary, mixing disciplines to examine how future objects could embody the same levels of design, desire and excitement. The resulting designs were judged by a jury chaired by Professor Peter Pfeiffer, Mercedes-Benz’s former chief designer. Judges included designers Fiona Swarovski-Grasser and Werner Baldessarini, A&W editor in chief Barbara Friedrich and Wallpaper’s own editorial director, Richard Cook.
The institutions taking part included Paris’s 250-year-old Ecole Nationale Supérieure des
Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Barcelona, the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Hamburg’s Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (HAW), Ecole Cantonale d’Art
de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, and MOME, the Moholy-Nagy University for Art and Design,
in Budapest.
See the stars of tomorrow show off their creative drive
The prize for the best design concept was awarded to the team of Istituto Marangoni, overseen by Davide Montagna, art director for special projects. Under Montagna’s tutelage, the product design, fashion styling and fashion design students put together a fashion-focused spread of four design items, each extrapolated from the visual elements of the GLK.
Each item embodied ‘four moments of the GLK life’, such as well-being, spare time, relaxation and beauty. Barcelona’s IED, represented by the I+ED multidisciplinary department, attained the prize for best design exhibit for a unique architectural installation: its SOUL project. Paris’s ENSAD was acknowledged with an honourable ‘empathy award’ for its project – the creation of a cinema-style world that had the GLK at its heart.
‘The design:project’ celebrated the GLK, a 4x4 that neatly dovetails the need for compact functionality with expressive design and a strong sense of the typical design features of Mercedes-Benz cars. It’s also proved the perfect springboard for creative experimentation.