Swarovski and Design Miami presented three designers with the 2016 Swarovski Designers of the Future Award this week in Basel, Switzerland.

The designer’s installations were unveiled on June 14th at the 11th edition of Design Miami / Basel, which is a design companion show to Art Basel, and runs through June 19th.

The winners are Studio Brynjar & Veronika, Yuri Suzuki, and Anjali Srinivasan, shown above.
All photos in the slideshow above © Mark Cocksedge.

The participating designers were asked to consider and interpret ‘betterment’ as part of the creative process, in response to the current need for designers to address the quality of interaction between people and the designed world around them.

The Winning Installations

Take a look at the winning installations in the slideshow above – and more photos plus additional descriptions at Design Boom.

Anjali Srinivasan’s Unda (shown in the slideshow above), is a touch-sensitive iluminating wave. The work is inspired by the beauty and impact of the human gesture. It has a rolling wave surface is made up of glass elements, utilizing touch-sensitive technology to create “Touch Crystal”, which responds to human touch with glowing illumination.

Studio Brynjar & Veronika’s Currents, (shown in the slideshow above) creates unexpected moments of beauty using “natural light in conversation with crystal.” It features window blinds made from crystal, to create a rainbow effect in natural light. The installation also features “reflections of water,” a series of crystal tiles that transform light into reflections.

London-based Japanese sound artist Yuri Suzuki explored crystal as an acoustic material, and created a mechanical, interactive “crystallophone” (also shown above). The instrument consists of 16 brass mechanical structures or ‘notes’, each one featuring a handmade crystal form, ranging 95-250mm in diameter and representing tones from c1 up to d3. When brass hammers hit the crystal, the vibrations are translated into beautiful, pure sound.

The Jury

The 2016 Swarovski Designers of the Future Award winners were selected by a jury of leading figures in the design world, including Nadja Swarovski, Member of the Swarovski Executive Board; Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum in London; Zoe Ryan, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute Chicago; Li Edelkoort, trend forecaster and Director of Parsons Interdisciplinary Design Program; Asif Khan, Architect; and Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Special Projects, Design Miami.