DTU student wins international award

Thursday 19 Oct 17

by Tine Naja Berg

About the Red Dot design award

Red Dot design award is presented every year. The awarded in three categories: Product design, communication design, and design concept. The Design Concept prize is given to products and ideas that have not yet been realized and manufactured.

Read more about Red Dot Award.

This year, the jury received a total of 4,724 ideas from 54 countries, of which 6 per cent can adorn themselves with a Red Dot award within the different categories.

In 2015, a Red Dot Award was also presented to DTU students. Back then it was for the disposable waste bin Dropbucket in the category “product design”. Read more in the article 'Entrepreneurs behind Dropbucket win international design award'.

Laptops are becoming thinner and simpler in their design, which means that many of them have limited USB access ports. A DTU student has now solved the problem with a new ‘USB-brick’, which has just received the coveted Red Dot design award.

Most people have tried to run out of USB ports on their laptop or experienced problems with connectors blocking the port next to them. That made Jintian Zhang, who is from China and an MSc Eng student on the Design and Innovation programme, consider how he could create an ideal and elegant solution.

The result was the USB-brick. It consists of seven modules with different types of laptop ports, which can be put together differently. In this way, you can access all the PC ports you need in the given situation.

“I got the idea for USB-brick from LEGO bricks that also can be mixed and matched in multiple ways. I started working on it right away and after two weeks, I had almost created the entire design”, Jintian explains.

Patented design
Jintian has made a concerted effort to ensure both user-friendliness and aesthetics in the design.

“I’ve tried to make a Scandinavian design which is user-friendly with clean lines in its expression”, he continues.

On 18 October, Jintian won the internationally recognized Red Dot design award in the category ‘Design Concept 2017’. The award was presented to him in Singapore.

jintian red dot 2017

“Naturally, I’m proud having received the Red Dot Award, which I now hope will create awareness of my design, so a company may want to put my USB-brick in production”, Jintian says.

So far, the design has not been tested in real life. It is a concept which only exists in the form of images and descriptions. But of course, Jintian hopes that the USB-brick someday will be produced, and he has therefore taken out a patent for the concept.

German Design Award for yoghurt packaging with straw
However, it is not the only award-winning design concept which Jintian holds a patent for. Earlier this year, he also won the internationally recognized German iF Design Award for his design of the yoghurt packaging ‘StrawGhurt’ which is pressed automatically together as you suck up the yoghurt through a straw.

“Both the German iF Design Award and Red Dot is internationally recognized design prizes and there is no doubt that winning them helps to prove that I’m good at designing different types of solutions”, concludes Jintian who will complete his MSc Eng degree in Design and Innovation in February 2018, after which he has yet to decide what to work with.