Here are the winners of IKEA Singapore’s Young Designer Award 2019

IKEA Singapore’s Young Designer Award (IKEA YDA) 2019 yesterday crowned Raffles College of Higher Education’s Shin Heetae the overall winner of this year’s competition. Deeply embedded in IKEA’s core philosophy of using less for more, the theme of Zero Waste is particularly timely amidst the urgency of climate change and the Singapore government’s push for the Year Towards Zero Waste.

Aimed to address waste decadence in Singapore and Asia, this year’s competition brief challenged students to propose and develop design innovations across four major waste streams – food, plastics, paper (or packaging) and e-waste.

Held at The Red Box on 1 July 2019 and attended by guest-of-honour, Dr. Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR), the Grand Finale of THE ZERO WASTE CHALLENGE saw the Top 20 finalists from all across Singapore’s top tertiary institutions vie for the final crown.

A total of 132 ideas were submitted this year, and they were evaluated by a panel of esteemed judges including:

• Ms Bee Lian Soh, Head of Sustainability IKEA Southeast Asia
• Ms Janice Gan, Deputy Manager, Environmental Protection Policy Department, National Environment Agency (NEA)
• Ms Elsa Dagný Ásgeirsdóttir, Project Coordinator, SPACE10
• Ms Melissa Low, Chief Curator, Young ChangeMakers, National Youth Council (NYC)
• Ms Cheryl Teh, Journalist, The Straits Times
• Fong Wei Lim, Senior correspondent, Lianhe Zaobao

With all teams bringing their A-game to the Grand Finale, Shin Heetae, of Raffles College of Higher Education’s project idea of Glodlampa stood out from the rest and emerged victoriously.

Glodlampa was developed with the idea of creating a zero-waste packaging design. By combining the oftentimes discarded packaging into the overall design, Glodlampa hopes to show consumers that packaging can be incorporated seamlessly into product design and ultimately reduce waste by enabling the dual usage of the product packaging.

As the top winner, Heetae will receive $1,500 in cash, and a trip to IKEA of Sweden and SPACE10 in Copenhagen.

The first and second runner-up teams, Loh Yi Wen and Gan Shoau Huay (Team LohGan) from LASALLE College of the Arts and Jordan Lim Yong Sheng from Singapore Polytechnic, will receive $1,000 and $500 respectively.

Mohamad Asyraf bin Mohamad Zailani and Nicholas Ho Wei Bin (Team ECO Road) from Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Vanessa Ang Jie Qing from LASALLE College of the Arts were each awarded the Merit Award and $200 IKEA gift cards each.

All five winners will each receive $1,000 seed funding from the National Youth Council to develop their prototypes which will be displayed at IKEA Tampines’ retail store from 1 August. Customers visiting the store will be able to vote for their favourite idea online. The team with the highest number of votes will win the People’s Choice Award and $200 IKEA gift card.

All photos credit to IKEA Singapore.