Origo Steering Wheel wins German Design Award 2021

The Origo Steering Wheel concept has received recognition from the German Design Council for “outstanding design quality”.

The project was chosen as a winner in the category of ‘Excellent Product Design – Human-Machine Interface’. The German Design Awards is one of the world’s most highly renowned design competitions.

High standards are assured by an international jury recognising only projects that truly represent pioneering contributions to the German and international design landscape. The Origo Steering Wheel was developed within the Finnish automotive ecosystem, in collaboration between Canatu, Siili Auto, TactoTek, Rightware, and Northern Works as a part of the Multimodal In-Vehicle Interaction and Intelligent Information Presentation (MIVI) project.

Transparent three-dimensional touch surfaces enable an intuitive HMI and enhance freedom by design. Only relevant information is displayed on-screen at any time to avoid overstimulation.

While designing a minimalistic and intuitive HMI, the team wanted physical forms to be expressive, supporting the use of controls, something that the current touch screens and capacitive controls quite often lack. The final Origo design perfectly aligns physical controls with the digital UI, creating an intuitive and exciting user experience unlike anything seen on cars before.

German Design Awards council advances the design-oriented landscape by identifying unique design trends and rewarding the best entries across three main categories: ‘Excellent Product Design’, ‘Excellent Communications Design’, and ‘Excellent Architecture’.

The 2021 competition attracted over 4,100 project submissions from 60 countries, and the international jury rewarded 955 participants with ‘Special Mention’, 362 with ‘Winner’, and 67 with ‘Gold’ across 71 sub-categories. The winners will receive their prizes at the official award ceremony next February, as a part of the Ambiente 2021 trade show in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.