Youths Zero-In on winning solutions at IKEA Singapore’s Young Designers Award 2019
2 JULY 2019, Singapore, Singapore – IKEA Singapore’s Young Designer Award (IKEA YDA)2019 yesterday crowned Raffles College of Higher Education’s Shin Heetae the overall winner of this year’s competition. Deeply embedded in IKEA’s core philosophy of using less for more, the theme of Zero Waste is particularly timely amidst the urgency of climate change and the Singapore government’s push for the Year Towards Zero Waste. Aimed to address waste decadence in Singapore and Asia, this year’s competition brief challenged students to propose and develop design innovations across four major waste streams – food, plastics, paper (or packaging) and e-waste.
Held at The Red Box on 1 July 2019 and attended by guest-of-honour, Dr. Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR), the Grand Finale of THE ZERO WASTE CHALLENGE saw the Top 20 finalists from all across Singapore’s top tertiary institutions vie for the final crown.
A total of 132 ideas were submitted this year, and they were evaluated by a panel of esteemed judges including, Ms. Bee Lian Soh, Head of Sustainability IKEA Southeast Asia; Ms. Janice Gan, Deputy Manager, Environmental Protection Policy Department, National Environment Agency (NEA); M.s Elsa Dagný Ásgeirsdóttir, Project Coordinator, SPACE10; Ms. Melissa Low, Chief Curator, Young ChangeMakers, National Youth Council (NYC); Ms. Cheryl Teh, Journalist, The Straits Times; and Mr. Fong Wei Lim, Senior correspondent, Lianhe Zaobao.
Now in its sixth year running, the IKEA YDA has grown to include meaningful partnerships with local organisations like National Environment Agency (NEA) who provided consultation on content and support during the Design Jam. More recently, NEA also announced the Say Yes To Waste Less campaign, in which, IKEA Singapore pledged to remove all single-use plastics from the home furnishing range by the end of 2019 in a bid to support Singapore’s drive towards a Zero Waste Nation.
“Here at IKEA, we’ve always been conscious of doing our part to use the planet’s resources carefully, to create more from less and ultimately leave a cleaner, healthier planet for generations to come. I’m extremely proud of what IKEA YDA has achieved in the past six years, with key movers like NEA, NYC and MEWR now onboard in support. The ideas submitted and presented by the students this year have been nothing short of impressive. We are heartened to see the youths of today show concerns for the environment and put on their thinking hats to develop meaningful solutions to solve some of the most pressing and complex issues. We hope that IKEA YDA will continue to provide young designers with a solid platform to further amplify their innovative design ideas and make a real difference,” shared Ms. Bee Lian Soh, Head of Sustainability, IKEA Southeast Asia.
Speaking to the students at the Grand Finale, Dr. Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for the Environment and Water Resources, said: “I am glad that IKEA has chosen ‘Zero Waste Challenge’ for this year’s IKEA YDA theme, in support of us designating 2019 as Singapore’s Year Towards Zero Waste. Over the last 40 years, the amount of waste disposed in Singapore has jumped seven-fold. We generated almost 8 million tonnes of waste in 2018. We need to take urgent action now to reduce, reuse and recycle our resources to turn waste into resource, trash into treasure.”
“IKEA has been a steadfast partner to the MEWR Family, through its recent partnership with NEA for the ‘Say Yes to Waste Less’ campaign. I would like to thank IKEA for providing young designers with this annual platform to flex their creative muscles and empowering them to express their passion for the environment. And to all the designers here, and designers-to-be, I urge you to continue to be bold, to stay the course, and become agents of change and custodians of Singapore’s journey towards a sustainable future,” she concluded.
With all teams bringing their A-game to the Grand Finale, Shin Heetae, of Raffles College of Higher Education’s project idea of Glodlampa stood out from the rest and emerged victorious. Glodlampa was developed with the idea of creating a zero-waste packaging design. By combining the oftentimes discarded packaging into the overall design, Glodlampa hopes to show consumers that packaging can be incorporated seamlessly into product design and ultimately reduce waste by enabling the dual usage of the product packaging.
Commenting on his win, Heetae said, “The IKEA YDA has been a really great experience for me! During the Design Jam, the facilitators and mentors were very helpful in guiding us step-by-step, from concept development to finally pitching our ideas! The feedback given from the judges not only helped to clarify my thought-processes, it also gave me more inspiration to improve my existing prototype. I was also very glad to have had the chance to mingle with my fellow participants – the sharing of ideas between us were very insightful, and I definitely gained fresh perspectives of the different forms of zero waste initiatives.”
As the top winner, Heetae will receive $1,500 in cash, and a trip to IKEA of Sweden and SPACE10 in Copenhagen.
The first and second runner-up teams, Loh Yi Wen and Gan Shoau Huay (Team LohGan) from LASALLE College of the Arts and Jordan Lim Yong Sheng from Singapore Polytechnic, will receive $1,000 and $500 respectively, while Mohamad Asyraf bin Mohamad Zailani and Nicholas Ho Wei Bin (Team ECO Road) from Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Vanessa Ang Jie Qing from LASALLE College of the Arts were each awarded the Merit Award and $200 IKEA gift cards each. [Please see below for more details on the winning team’s entries]
All five winners will each receive $1,000 seed funding from the National Youth Council to develop their prototypes which will be displayed at IKEA Tampines’ retail store from 1 August. Customers visiting the store will be able to vote for their favourite idea online. The team with the highest number of votes, will win the People’s Choice Award and $200 IKEA gift card.
About the Runner-Up teams and Merit Award winners
• 1st runner up: SLUSS by Loh Yi Wen and Gan Shoau Huay (LASALLE College of the Arts) With shower bottles contributing to a huge portion of modern day’s plastic pollution and shower gel pumps often pumping out more products than needed, soap bars are a low-cost and ecofriendly alternative. SLUSS is a scalp massager and body exfoliator that encourages the public to reduce plastic waste through the usage of shower liquid products and opt for soap bars instead.
• 2nd runner up: ZERO FOOD WASTE APP by Jordan Lim Yong Sheng (Singapore Polytechnic) The Zero Food Waste app was designed to tackle food waste in various aspects of a typical person’s day to day life while trying to create a community movement towards reducing food waste via interactions and connections that is a product of the application’s features. With features like Inventory, Trade, Where To and Donate, the app hopes to tackle the issue of overbuying, and provide methods to optimise the use of each ingredient before it goes to waste. When used to its full effect, the app hopes to exponentially reduce food waste in Singapore.
• Merit Awardees:
- ECOroad by Mohamad Asyraf bin Mohamad Zailani and Nicholas Ho Wei Bin (Ngee Ann Polytechnic) With space is limited in Singapore, and roads in 2012 taking up to 9081 lane-km of land in Singapore (approximately 13,483 soccer field worth), ECOroad hopes to harness the heat energy found within roads to generate electricity by utilising the space that is already being used, and ultimately avoid producing more waste.
- Tapau Kit by Vanessa Ang Jie Qing (LASALLE College of the Arts) Tapau Kit is a set of environmentally friendly reusable takeaway-ware, designed with local food culture in mind. The series takes after the form of everyday single-use “artefacts” that are familiar to the Singaporean psyche. Tapau Kit addresses the adverse environmental impacts of single-use takeaway-ware while preserving our lifestyle, habit and identity. While there is a pre-conceived notion shared by many Singaporeans that adopting environmental-conscious habits may cause lifestyle inconveniences as well as result in the need to eliminate customary practices, Tapau Kit hopes to subvert this mentality by honours our food heritage and our takeaway culture, all while reducing waste.
For more information, please refer to IKEA.sg/yda.
