It is with much gratitude and admiration that we celebrate the jury alumni members of the Core77 Design Awards.
As the Vice President of Design at fuseproject, Qin Li leads the creative team, overseeing Industrial Design, Experience Design, Environments, Visual Design, and CMF. Harnessing her creativity and leadership, she takes a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to the team and design, and engaging all the disciplines within a fully informed, thorough, and integrated process.
Qin's philosophy is rooted in a human-centered approach. She firmly believes that designers have the power to drive cultural change, enhance the quality of life, and address some of the world's most pressing issues. In her time at fuseproject, she has played a pivotal role in guiding designs to market for a diverse range of clients, spanning Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, non-profits, and entrepreneurs. These designs have encompassed various categories, including AI & robotics, health & wellness, wearable tech, consumer electronics, furniture, retail & exhibition, packaging & soft goods, among others.
Qin’s work has been honored with global recognition and numerous awards, including Gold and a Special Award from IDEA for the Snoo bassinet and Ori Living, 100 Best Inventions of 2020 from TIME Magazine for a smart bot, Moxie, designed for Embodied, and 2023 Design Project of The Year Award from Dezeen for the Cionic Neural Sleeve. Qin is also the recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award from the Academy of Art University.
I consider myself a versatile 'Swiss Army Knife' of design, focusing on connecting the dots between brand, product, and user by emphasizing human-centered design to maintain a value-oriented experience. Initially trained by fuseproject and Studio F.A. Porsche, I have spent the past fifteen years working for leading design studios in Europe, the USA, and Asia. During this time, I collaborated with startups and Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries, picking up a few design awards every now and then. Being naturally curious, I am fascinated by human-machine collaboration as part of the creative process and always wondering what’s next.
My professional experience is a melting pot across multiple continents, agency to in-house, vision to execution, and design to business.
Always asking "why", I believe good designers strive to understand basic human needs. Like culture, I believe good design is basic fabric of human life.
Tingbin has been a designer, educator, and serial entrepreneur. As a designer, his works have won many design awards, were reported by Time magazine, ABC Good Morning America program, BBC news, etc. And was permanently collected by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum. He has been teaching and managing at three institutions in three different countries. He was the Dean of the School of Design of Pearl Academy in India; an Interaction Design professor at San Jose State University in California, USA; and he was the founder and director of the Transportation Design program at CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. He founded Gopackup, which connects travelers with locals; he cofounded Trisenx, which brought the third sense, smell into the internet; he founded Nearal, a location-based professional networking platform; and he also founded and worked on MeiCAD, an AI-powered CAD tool.
Dual-decade champion of design innovation culture for multi-sensory scenery and visceral joy. Product leader from the explorer teams that built iconic physical product experiences like Jawbone hearables, Jawbone Jambox, Sonos Trueplay auto-tuning, Sonos Move, multimodal UI, ambient interaction, generative moodscapes, and over 50 patents for tomorrow's experiences.
Sabina Weiss is an innovation designer focusing on products that help to channel meaningful experiences.
Currently part of Special Projects, award-winning innovation studio on a mission to enhance the unquantifiable aspects of life: empathy, well-being, and delight, with meaningful design and invention. Working with brave companies to bring clarity to complex problems, discover new opportunities and transform them into tomorrow’s most loved customer experiences and products.
Through her career, Sabina has contributed to several complex projects – strategically bringing to life brand values, and physical and digital assets for companies: Google, Sony, Graphcore, Rolls-Royce, Hyundai Kia, Microsoft, Sabi, and Fortnum and Mason.
Sabina holds an Innovation Design Engineering MA Royal College of Art / MSc Imperial College London; where her major project was a hybrid craft-technology interface that has received several accolades and exhibition features including Victoria and Albert Museum, Barbican Centre, and Somerset House.
Nishita Gill is the founder of Treemouse, an award-winning strategic consultancy that applies design-led problem-solving techniques to uncharted areas. Over a decade, they’ve been fundamental in scaling design to areas like building systems that help people feel comfortable about seeking treatment for virulent diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis C, building product feature sets that increase acceptance of digital applications, and enhancing ways to build more resilient and people-centric public systems that reach 1.3bn people in India.
Nishita is passionate about adapting niche concepts and novel approaches for mass adoption and frequently advises startups on building feature-sets that scale. She lives in London and is always searching for the next best flavor of tea.
I am an independent industrial design consultant committed to bringing coherent vision and expert delivery to the development of hardware in the connected and analogue spaces. Across different product scales, I’ve helped ambitious tech start-ups and some of the worlds most prestigious brands, informing and elevating their business with robust strategic thinking and industrial craft.
Notable outputs include high-profile civic projects such as the London Olympic Torch and the Elizabeth Line Train interior. I’ve explored future autonomous vehicle experiences with Honda, luxury consumer products with Axor Hansgrohe and the world’s first fully integrated quantum computing system for scientific and commercial use - IBM Quantum System One.
Most recently with Sky I led the development of their core hardware proposition, culminating in the delivery of the Sky Glass streaming TV platform in 2021.