Nuka eternal pencil, Whooshi amplifier and others: Ukrainian projects that received Red Dot

The next finalists of the prestigious annual design field award Red Dot Awards have become known. Among them are Nuka eternal pencil, Tom and Zaya children’s beds, Whooshi portable amplifiers and kofta branded backpacks. The editorial of AIN.UA was reported about it by the press service of the Red Dot Group Company, which organizes the award.

Nuka

Nuka is a startup that came up with the technology of the “eternal” pencil. The idea of the product belongs to three founders of the startup: Mykyta Vladykin, Kateryna Mykhalko, and Eugene Shylo.

The point is that the writing part of the pencil itself is not made of a slate, but of a metal alloy. It writes just like a regular pencil, it can be erased with an eraser, it does not crumble and does not stain hands. Studio Concepter provided the startup with acceleration services and the development of an industrial design. The prize was given to Concepter, but the co-founder Vlad Tislenko emphasizes that this is common merit.

As Evgenia Medvedeva from Concepter said, a whole team participated in the product design. Project Manager Yegor Kurguzov found information about Red Dot Young Professionals Application Day: young designers are given a chance one day a year (on December 5, 2018) to win one of 50 preferential places and fight for the main Red Dot award.

“We were very pleased that we made it to the list of these fifty lucky ones, because besides the free application, in case of victory, the winner pack will also be free in the main competition (which is about 4,000 euros),” says Evgenia.

The prototype of the pencil needed to be created very quickly, while it had to be of very high quality. CTO Concepter Serhiy Shcherbakov helped with this, who quickly found a factory in China, where he worked on the prototype. It was sent immediately from China to Germany, so the team was a little nervous because the finished prototype was seen only in the photo. But as a result, it won the Red Dot Award Product Design 2019.

Whooshi

One of the finalists was the Ukrainian project — the portable amplifier of the Whooshi, as well as Nuka, one of the CES participants of this year.

This is a device for listening to music that improves sound quality and also makes the owner’s wired headphones wireless. The device has its own application, which adjusts the sound to the user’s preference, as well as the built-in equalizer.

Interia

Not only high-tech Ukrainian projects received design awards. For example, the Ukrainian brand of baby beds “with ears” Mickey, Tom and Zaya. As the name suggests, each of the beds received “ears” from the corresponding character. They are produced by Interia studios. They look like this:

kofta

Also, Honorable Mention (incentive prize) from Red Dot was awarded to stylish Ukrainian backpacks from the brand kofta, more precisely, the Imago series, named after the developmental stage of the insect larva and looking correspondingly.