European Design Awards 2011 (#edawards)

On 14 May 2011 we received the Gold award for “Book Layout” and surprisingly also the “Best of Show” award during the awards ceremony in the Dance theater in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Jakob and I travelled to Vilnius in the early morning on Saturday, May 14. We met at the airport in Vienna where I just made it on time to board the plane to Lithuania. We stayed at the very nice and reasonable hotel “Congress” and spent the afternoon in the city since we missed the last chance to participate in one of the organised design walks. But it was sunny and we enjoyed our beer in the beatiful and relaxed old part of Vilnius in expectation of the event later that day. We took a taxi to the venue at 7pm just to be sure to be there on time when the awards start at 7:30pm. Unfortunately our driver misunderstood the street (although it was written on a paper) and dropped us somewhere pointing to an old house with the same number 11 as indicated on our paper. Although we were wondering about the house and environment we got out of the car and searched for the theater where the awards were supposed tot ake part. Nothing there. Wrong address. 10 minutes to go. F*%k. :) Fortunately the people were really nice and helped us to organise another taxi to the right place when they saw that we desperately tried to stop one of the passing taxis (which doesn’t work like this in Lithuania). Finally we got to the venue - a bit late, but just on time for the ceremony. It started immediately with out category “Book Layout” and it was great to receive the prize as our smiles on the photos show. It was nice to see all the other great works from various categories from print to online and videos. At the very end, three special prizes were announced starting with the Jury Award for subsoda from the Netherlands for their work “Altijd Wat Wijzer”. Jakob whispered me that for the blink of an eye he thought we might even get the latter. We were laughing about it and said that this would have been too much as we already received a gold award. Then Demetrios Fakinos, Managing Director European Design Awards, and ceremony host Ugne Skonsmanaite called the winners for Best of Show: Jakob Schn… WOOOOHOOOOOOOO! - we were screaming like little girls during a boygroup concert and probably nobody heared the rest of what they said. :) Later, “Les Graphiquants” from France received the title of European Design Agency of the Year 2011. After the group photo we all went to a club in town and ahd a long party with many great people. It was a great event and we met many interesting people! Later that night back in the hotel, we had to tweet a photo of the “European Design Stars”, as the trophies are nicknamed. Thanks a lot for all your congratulations! Hopefully this is another small step to promote the approach of service design across other design disciplines and through various forthcoming publication further to the public.

Photos by Lukas Balandis (more photos) & Marc Stickdorn. More infos on the European Design Awards website.