The 2018 SEGD Global Design Awards, the only international awards program focused on user experiences in the built environment, officially opened for entries on Saturday, Dec. 1, 2018.
The SEGD Global Design Awards have set the standard of excellence for environmental graphic design and experiential graphic design for over 30 years—honoring design work that connects people to place by providing direction, content and compelling experiences in public spaces—since 1987.
“The SEGD Global Design Awards are the only awards exclusively for experiential graphic design,” says Clive Roux, CEO of SEGD. “That means your projects will be reviewed by jury experts in your field like Lance Wyman, Lee Skolnick, Refik Anadol and this year’s Jury Chair, Kathy Fry.”
The multidisciplinary SEGD Global Design Awards jurors evaluate submissions on criteria that includes: connecting people to place, creating a memorable user experience and solving the client’s objective or design challenge. The jury will be composed of nine highly respected practitioners, from around the world who represent a range of design disciplines.
The seven entry categories reflect the core practice areas of Experiential Graphic Design: Digital Experience Content, Exhibition, Interactive Experience, Placemaking and Identity, Public Installation, Strategy/Research/Planning and Wayfinding. Honor and Merit design award winners will be chosen from submissions in each category. A Best of Show Award will be chosen from among the Honor awards and a Sylvia Harris Award winner will be selected from all submissions for a project which exemplifies design for the public good in honor of the legacy of Sylvia Harris, founder of Citizen Research & Design.
The 2017 SEGD Global Design Awards Best of Show was an impressive and dynamic light-based media installation at the Kunstmuseum Basel entitled “Light Frieze.” In 2018, the Best of Show award went to a futuristic machine-learning-fueled digital archive exhibition, “Archive Dreaming.” The 2017 and 2018 winners of the Sylvia Harris Award were “Who, Like Me, is Threatened?” an interactive installation at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta and “The Red Stairs,” a student-led residential wayfinding project from Tongji University, respectively.
Past winning projects have ranged from design research initiatives to media-rich interactive installations, complex wayfinding systems, retail and interior design, museum exhibitions, branded environments, architectural signage and contemplative public art. Winning projects in each of the seven categories dating back to 1998 are available to view in the SEGD Global Design Awards archive gallery.
Winning is an effective opportunity for individual designers, firms and fabricators to promote their best work and raise their public profile because of dramatic increases in visits to the awards gallery. In the last year alone, the awards gallery received more than 70,000 unique visitors and 280,000 pageviews, over 10 percent of which were attributed to clients.
The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2019, via SEGD’s online design awards entry system. Submissions will be accepted with late fees through February 14, 2019. Submission guidelines are available for download on the 2019 SEGD Global Design Awards Entry page.
Winners will be honored during the 2019 SEGD Conference, June 6–8 in Austin, and announced on SEGD.org.
