Winners of SDAY 2019 awarded

Personified alphabet characters designed by Strydom.

South African designer Emma Maria Strydom has topped the list of 21 winners of the fourth edition of the 2019 Shenzhen Design Awards for Young Talent (SDAY), taking home the Grand Award with a prize of 100,000 yuan (US$14,390), according to an award ceremony held online yesterday.

The award ceremony was one of the four serial events of SDAY that are staged during the Shenzhen Design Week 2020, which kicked off Saturday and will last until Aug. 30.

The other three events include the Excellent Design Exhibition of SDAY 2019 that is being held at the Jupiter Museum of Art, a poster exhibition titled “Call For Posters: All against nCoV,” and an exhibition named “Me and 1m3 of City.”

The 21 winners of SDAY 2019 were selected by an international jury of seven after reviewing the entries with expertise and professionalism.

Strydom impressed the jury with her design of personified alphabet characters in the supermarket, entitled “Sifunda – We learn by talking together.” The project aims at turning an everyday trip to a supermarket into an opportunity for enriched caregiver-child interactions.

“Inclusive design is something that I’ve practiced through my work for a very long time. It’s really important to have design with purpose that can not only look very cool but help someone else’s life, solve a problem, or how we engage in things,” said Strydom.

“The fact that it’s a free entry makes a lot of difference for a lot of people. I hope SDAY aspires to keep doing that,” she added.

Four individual designers and six professional design teams from Nagoya, Bilbao, Singapore, Saint Etienne, Bandung, Montreal, Nanjing, Beijing and Shenzhen, won the Merit Awards.