Designers’ Saturday Oslo invites design students and emerging designers to compete for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes in the Designers’ Saturday Awards Best Talents competition.

There will be a dedicated exhibition of the nominated entries during Designers' Saturday 2025, and the winner will be announced at the Saturday Night Party.

WHO CAN PARTICIPATE?

All design students and designers who have graduated within the last five years from Norwegian design institutions, as well as Norwegian students at equivalent colleges/universities abroad, are welcome to participate. You may submit one or more products that naturally fall within our fields and are no older than two years.

GOAL

The ambition with DS Awards Best Talents is to recognise the emerging and up-and-coming young designers. Our mission is to celebrate publicly the forward thinking within our respective design fields and to elevate the sustainable, experimental, novel and groundbreaking works of design. The further objective is to inspire and connect the creative minds and the industry together for potential future collaborations.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

The DS Awards Best Talents seeks for the greatest works in the field. The assessment will be done through a holistic evaluation, where the following aspects will be the bases:

• sustainability (environmental, material, cultural and social)
• conceptual relevance and clarity
• new thinking and originality
• form, materiality and craft

These criteria are not hierarchical, and each work can tackle the expectations uniquely as found relevant for the project.

JURY

The head of the jury for the competition is the internationally renowned Danish designer Cecilie Manz. The other jury members are representatives from the six leading design institutions in Norway: the Oslo School of Architecture, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Kristiania University College, Oslo Metropolitan University, NTNU, and the University of Bergen. The jury is committed to recognizing and appreciating the diversity of design approaches and types of works.

PRIZES

1st prize: NOK 50,000
2nd prize: NOK 20,000
3rd Prize: NOK 10,000

DEADLINE

20.05.2025 (23:59)

APPLICATION

The application should consist of single pdf document to be viewed on screen (landscape-format). First page should clearly state the 1) title of the work, 2) the author(s) and copyright owners, 3) contact details (mobile number and email) and education status, 4) short text describing the concept of the work by addressing the evaluation criteria (max 200 words). Maximum number of pages is 5, illustrating the project through drawings, renderings and photographs. No external links should be included. Maximum file size is 5 MB.

Application should be emailed to: [email protected]

Subject field in the email: “Best Talents 2025, ‘title-of-your-work’”.

The shortlisted applicants should be prepared to exhibit their work physically in Oslo in September during the Designers' Saturday. Technical details of the exhibition will be provided to those who are shortlisted.

CONTACT PERSONS

Professor Toni Kauppila: [email protected]
Heidi Lie, Designers' Saturday: [email protected]