Prizes awarded for the fifth “MAIER International Design Competition”

The €8,000 first prize in the “Professionals” category went to the project Colour & Trim & Light developed by Miriam Rey and Beatriz Andrade, designers from the IBO Group, which has offices in Barcelona, Brazil, France, Germany and China. The winning project focused on the qualities of chromotherapy and how someone’s mood or feeling of tiredness can be changed by applying cold and warm colours to the ambient light inside a vehicle.

The €8,000 first prize in the “Professionals” category went to the project Colour & Trim & Light developed by Miriam Rey and Beatriz Andrade.

The €4,000 prize in the “Students” category was won by the project Perfect Imperfection, entered by Bettina Kunkl and Anna Katharina Greif, Design students from the University of Reutlingen (Germany). They looked at how the supersaturation of industrial perfection has given rise to a new way of evaluating materials and products, a changing aesthetics, which “is not a more elegant perfection, but a perfect imperfection”.

And the €3,000 prize for the “Best collection of sample materials” went to the team made up by José García Magdaleno, Javier Salinero Rubio, Begoña Becerra, Karol Bledowski, and Marta Chodorowska, students from the La Rioja University College of Design.

This is the fifth time that this event has been held and there were a total of 93 projects entered from countries such as France, Holland, Italy, Germany, Spain, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and the USA, which shows the enormous interest aroused by the competition organised by the MAIER Group.

Colour & Trim

All the projects taking part this year were linked to the Colour & Trim field, a widely extended concept in the automotive world, involving the design of colours, materials and textures for vehicle decor. The entries focused on the development of products for both vehicle exteriors and interiors, with their Colour & Trim proposals centred on vehicle dashboard fascias, door panel handgrips, vehicle front modules and pillars.

The assessment criteria used by the Jury, made up of representatives from Design Centres, Car Manufacturers, Public Bodies and Designers from the Automotive Sector, were: Innovation in the design proposals, quality of the deliverables and their applicability to the automotive sector.

The Competition Jury consisted of Jean Pierre Ploué, Design Manager from the Peugeot-Citroen Group; Martin Bremer, Director of Colour & Trim Design at Mercedes; Txema Gisasola, President of MONDRAGON Corporation’s General Council; and Imanol Pradales, the Provincial Government of Bizkaia’s Director of Economic Development.

The aim of the competition is to encourage and promote Innovation in the Maier Group in order to offer added value and a competitive differential to its customers through design. Its aims are eminently practical, as it is not merely appearance-orientated but also applicable to production, either by Maier itself or by other car manufacturers the firm usually works with.

About MAIER

The MAIER Group, which belongs to MONDRAGON and has its headquarters in Ajangiz (Bizkaia), currently operates seven production plants: its main headquarters in Ajangiz; Maier Navarra, in the Ultzama Valley; Maier Ferroplast, in Porriño (Pontevedra) close to Vigo; Maier UK, in the United Kingdom; Maier Chequia in the Czech Republic; Maier Cromoplástica, in Italy; and Alpha Maier, in India.

In 2012 the company posted a turnover of €202m, of which close to 70% was from international sales. It has a total work force of 1,698 people. It also runs the MTC (Maier Technology Center), specialising in plastic technologies for the automotive sector, as well as developing associated decor.

The MAIER Group, deeply rooted in the plastic automotive components sector, is a business group, whose key factors and stand-out points are decor (painting and chrome-plating, as well as laser and tampoprinting among other technologies) and the mastery of parts with a high level of functional complexity.

Maier manufactures a wide range of interior and exterior car parts: front grilles, cowl top louvers, handles and handgrips, wheel covers, dashboard fascias, trims, side mouldings, etc.