red dot award: design team of the year 2001

Festo AG, the innovation company which made its name with spectacular new developments in the fields of industrial automation and electrical and compressed air tools, can now call the "red dot award: design team of the year" its own. The award is made annually to a company whose design achievements in recent years have been especially outstanding. Following the award of the "Radius" challenge trophy to the Sony Design Team last year, the valued and contested cup goes this year to the company from Esslingen.

The Festo Design Team headed by Prof. Axel Thallemer impressed the jury with systematically planned design and extremely high design quality. "Path-breaking new product developments give Festo AG not only a leading role within the industry; their design achievements shine far beyond the boundaries of the market", as Prof. Dr. Peter Zec, President of the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen, commented.

Hot air and bionic structures

With a fair wind and a lot of hot air, the designers, engineers and mathematicians at Festo AG create pneumatic structures and bionic systems to open up new opportunities in aircraft construction, space exploration and architecture. The Festo designers use air as a plastic construction material which simultaneously gives the products strength and flexibility.

The product range of Festo AG contains both the unusual and the surprising. "Stingray", for example: a combination of an aeroplane and airship whose heavy duty polyester fabric is given shape by compressed air. The flying object is an approach to a solution for the environmental and nuisance problems of transport aircraft, as it can take off vertically with a kind of "sting" and land almost anywhere.

"Airstructure" is a veritable castle in the air: the exhibition hall is the world's first buildable structure whose supports are predominantly composed of air chambers. Pneumatic structures support the building, which has an interior of 375 square metres and a volume of around 2,250 cubic metres. At a weight of 7.5 kilograms per square metre, it is astoundingly light.

Design as the shaping of social and communicative processes

Apart from its eye-catching colour schemes, textiles and graphics, Festo AG is notable for a well thought-out, strategic design management. "At Festo, design is not just the shaping of an object, but the shaping of social and predominantly communicative processes, at the end of which there may be a real, three dimensional object", as Prof. Axel Thallemer explains. Design, then, is a holistic corporate strategy at Festo.

Festo AG will be setting off a real fireworks display with its fascinating products at the award ceremony in front of and in the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen. The spectators can also look forward to air displays and balloon trips. The "red dot" award products from Festo AG and the other winners can be seen at the premises of the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in the special exhibition from 25 June to 22 July 2001.