Blink Is Honored At Fourth Annual San Francisco Design Week

Blink is honored with a prestigious San Francisco Design Week Award, announced today by the nonprofit organization San Francisco Design Week (SFDW). Blink received the User Experience Award, which recognized our work with the Special Olympics. Our project was recognized for its ground-breaking design and commitment to thought leadership in meeting the needs of a positive future for society.

Blink was recognized for a new app designed for Special Olympics athletes, coaches, and fans. The mobile app we designed extends the games beyond the field. By focusing on empowering athletes first, Blink helped the Special Olympics design a sports experience for everyone that goes beyond highlights, medal counts, and awards. The result is a purer and more human experience of sporting events. The app is currently in development, launching prior to July 2022.

“I am thrilled that this work and our team has been recognized by San Francisco Design Week with this award,” said Scott Lambridis, head of design in Blink San Francisco. “I am also grateful to the Special Olympics athletes, coaches, and families that shared their experiences with us in the research phase of this project. Their insights were essential in crafting a mobile app to fit their needs.”

“We are extremely excited to announce the 2021 San Francisco Design Week Awards,” says SFDW Executive Director Dawn Zidonis. “The quality of the many entries we received was exceptional, exceeding expectations in answering our theme ‘POWER’ with inspiration and innovation. Congratulations to this year’s outstanding and diverse winners.

San Francisco Design Week (SFDW) is the premier gathering of the world’s most active design community. The theme, “POWER” was met by award winners from leading design firms, in-house teams, and creative individuals, who are honored today.

SFDW Design Awards is an international design competition seeking to encourage thought leadership by supporting designers whose works can contribute towards a positive future for society. The Design Awards celebrates and recognizes exemplary work in all fields of design, including architecture, interior design, industrial design, communication design, and user experience design.

Twenty-five winning projects and seven honorable mentions were selected by a jury comprised of distinguished professionals, who reviewed submissions from an exceptionally competitive pool of applicants from USA and Europe.

San Francisco Design Week 2021 Award Winners and Honorable Mentions were conceived by designers from United Kingdom, France, South Pacific and USA, and selected from a pool of applicants in the following categories: Architecture; Civic Design; Communications Design; Data; Health and Wellness; FinTech; Future of Foods; Industrial Design; Interior Design; Social Impact; Student Category; Systems Design; Travel & Hospitality; Urban Mobility; User Experience; VR/AR/XR; and Wild Card.

Each winning project displayed the following characteristics:

Impact—Design that represents a substantial shift in the way a particular process is created, executed, perceived, or experienced.
Singularity—Products and ideas that go above and beyond contemporaneous work being done within distinct fields of design.
Inclusiveness—Work that empowers those previously underrepresented in the design community and emboldens social mobility at all levels.
Social Responsibility—Design that offers solutions for people with needlessly insurmountable barriers to entry in all walks of life.
Ease of Use—Design that can be easily understood and applied by the end user.
Visual Appeal—Projects, ideas, and processes that not only solve problems, but do so with aesthetics that accentuate and elevate the experience from start to finish.
Feasibility—Design that can be sensibly funded, implemented and embraced.

The SFDW 2021 Design Awards esteemed jury comprised:

Anisha Jian, Product Design Director, CRUISE
Mauro Rego, Design Lead, Google AI, GOOGLE
Sean Mclean-Bergel, Interior Designer, MCCLEAN BERGEL
Andre Pennycooke, Director of Product Design, VARO
Janet Tam, Co-Founder and Principal, NOLL&TAM
Mengyuan Tu, Product, RUN THE WORLD
Heather Bybee, Director of Packaging, AMMUNITION
Hugo Eccles, Creative Director, SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

The 2021 winners’ entries are displayed prominently and permanently online at San Francisco Design Week.

About San Francisco Design Week

Launched in 2006, San Francisco Design Week (SFDW) is an essential week-long regional festival that showcases the unique intersection of ideas, design, business & entrepreneurism that makes the Bay Area the birthplace of the future.

Now a global phenomenon, San Francisco’s international success is born from a historically free-spirited entrepreneurialism, coupled with the imaginative vision of contemporary design and state-of-the-art technology. Pioneers of new ways of looking at the world, nimble Bay Area start-ups are now among the world’s most influential design-led companies, producing products, services and experiences that profoundly influence the daily lives of billions of people globally.

This year, 2020, with approximately 150 events, SFDW celebrates this spirit of newness as the first regional virtual design festival by providing approximately 60,000+ attendees unique access to virtual exhibitions and conversations with the designers who are shaping the future — from architecture to fashion, product design to digital services, and everything in between.

San Francisco Design Week is a community event led by a team of advisors and a core committee that represents the diversity of design disciplines in the Bay Area. SFDW is organized by AIGA San Francisco, the professional association for design in partnership with IDSA, the Center for Architecture and AIA, SFFAMA, SEGD, SDN, IXDA, local consulates, design universities, neighborhood associations, and museums. For more information, visit: https://sfdesignweek.org/.

About Blink

Blink is the user experience firm for the world’s leading companies. We use evidence-driven design to create products that people use, love, and remember. With studios in Austin, Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, Blink brings two decades of experience to research, design, and strategy for clients such as Amazon, Microsoft, NASA, and Starbucks. Learn more at https://blinkux.com.