Hankook Tire’s Design Innovation Project 2020 has been selected as the winner of the iF Design Award in the categories of Professional Concept and Communication.

“This recognition demonstrates our design leadership in the industry as well as our vision for future mobility. By incorporating new ideas with our cutting-edge technology, we are continuously exploring design concepts for the next generation and strengthening our premium brand asset,” said Jimmy Kwon, Vice President of Hankook Tire Brand Lab.

Design Innovation Project

The Design Innovation Project is Hankook’s internal research and development (R&D) initiative. For the Design Innovation 2020, Hankook collaborated with professors and students from the Department of Industrial Design at the University of Cincinnati.

Under the theme ‘Urban Reshaping’, the project visualized the transformation of cities geared by mobility and reconfigured them as part of living spaces, rather than stand-alone vehicles in the future, where augmented automation infrastructure and technologies such as eco-friendly technology, autonomous driving and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are to be adopted.

Hankook’s modular platform, the ‘Hankook Platform System (HPS)-Cell’, took first place for the Professional Concept category.

It is applied with ‘Hankook Innovative Performance (HIP)’, which represents Hankook’s technological vision and explains that the tire sits at the centre of the mobility. The program received high scores in the Form criterion which evaluates aesthetics and execution, as well as in the Differentiation criterion which evaluates individuality and intrinsic value.

The tire of HPS-Cell tire features a unit-cell structure. It is a concept tire that uses sensor technology to monitor tire treads and road conditions in real time and to respond to wear-out risks and change tread patterns according to the road condition.

The Design Innovation Film 2020 won the award in the Communication category.

The concept film was produced to bring the conceptual tire and HPS-Cell platform to life and illustrates how an urban population in the future may use this kind of mobility platform.

The contributions are evaluated across nine categories including: Product, Packaging, Communication, Interior Architecture, Professional Concept, Service Design, Architecture, User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI), based on the following criteria: idea, form, function, differentiation and social impact. This year, more than 9,500 contributions were submitted from 52 countries.