The China Design Intelligence Award (DIA) is back, honouring the best in international design

The China Design Intelligence Award (DIA), the first international competition set up by the China Academy of Art in 2015, in collaboration with Poli.Design, identifies the best in design worldwide, both in terms of products and professionals and studios. 



In 2021, the sixth edition of DIA is transformed into the more complex project "DIA Global Design Epidemic Strategy", aimed at exploring, through design practices, a new post-pandemic ordinariness, encouraging innovation based on the concepts of New Ecology, New Security, New Space, New Social, New Office, New Education, New Healthcare, New Transport, and New Possibilities. The crisis is therefore a source of reflection, leading to new design, capable of transforming tradition and creating increasingly imaginative and revolutionary design solutions. 

The deadline for submitting projects is 25 June 2021. It will be possible to participate through public registration on the official DIA website (www.di-award.org) or through the nomination of some experts, which in fact allows the nominees to go directly to the final stage of the competition. There are two competition categories: Product Group and Concept Group. 


Scribit by Carlo Ratti Associati

Among the Italian winning projects in 2020, the silver medal went to the Scribit project by Carlo Ratti Associati, a robot capable of drawing and writing automatically on vertical surfaces, transforming walls into interactive canvases that are always connected. Among the honourable mentions (DIA Top 100), the Pasta between Parentheses project by Liu Yue, which aims to draw attention to traditional food culture in the context of increasingly over-industrialisation; the Hannes project, winner of the Compasso d'Oro 2020, a prosthetic hand developed by INAIL, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia with the design support of ddpstudio; the Elastica project (a flexible linear lamp for ceiling-floor installation) and X3 by Habits Studio (a domestic treadmill that can be easily folded and stored). 


Hannes by ddpstudio