UB Architect Honored for Producing One of the Year's Hottest Industrial Designs

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Abir Mullick of Buffalo, professor of architecture in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, is one of 174 international recipients of the 2002 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA Award) presented by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and Business Week magazine.

Mullick won a silver medal in the "Design Exploration" category for his universal bathrooms. Their moveable fixtures and panels permit existing bathrooms to be retrofitted economically and attractively to accommodate any user, regardless of age, size or degree of mobility.

The society selected 41 gold, 60 silver and 73 bronze award winners out of 1,116 entries in several categories.

"This jury had vast knowledge of all the categories and was stringent in its deliberations and choices," said jury chair Chuck Jones, a fellow of the IDSA. "These winning designs were face-changing designs, functional, hit the specific target audience and were designed with the sound principles that our members demand."

The judges said products didn't win just for looking good. They had to perform their function or create a needed functionality better than any of their predecessors and, as one judge said, " raised the bar of excellence for that category."

Other winning designs included the much-touted gyroscopic Segway Human Transporter, the 2002 Ford Thunderbird; an ingenious Smithsonian traveling exhibition on the Hubbell Telescope; a home spa soaking tub made to spill the water over its edge in a stunning, continuous overflow, and a compact, economical ultrasound machine.

Winners included designers from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Turkey and United Kingdom.

Photos and descriptions of the winning designs are available at http://www.idsa.org/.