The Taiwan Golden Pin Design Award, established in 1981, is perhaps the most prominent recognition and celebration of design from huaren (“Chinese-speaking”) communities every year. While Taiwan is a Chinese-speaking country, the term of “huaren” design seeks to find commonality with other Asian territories such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, as well as to separate from “Chinese” design, which can sometimes be mistakenly assumed to refer to design originating solely from China. This “huaren” movement is both a step towards togetherness, and a step towards a distinction, and the Golden Pin Design Award is here to show off the projects leading the way.
This year, the design awards saw a new reckoning: people are caring a lot more about their spaces and the design of them. The Spatial Design category of the Golden Pin Awards accounted for 23% of the total number of entries?other categories include Product, Communication and Social?and almost half of the 686 spatial design projects were in the Residential Space subcategory. This trend even spilled over to the Product Design category, where more than half of the entries were for home products such as home appliances and furniture. It seems that Chinese-speaking consumers are paying more attention to their lifestyle, their living spaces, and what they surround themselves with on a day-to-day basis, and huaren designers are keen to design for this eager base.
A remarkable ...