The Core77 Design Awards recognize that creation is rarely the result of solitary effort. Design is a team sport! So we commissioned the team of Rich Brilliant Willing to design the inaugural award by re-imagining the typical awards trophy. We wanted something that would celebrate of the range of talent and extraordinary effort that go into the making of great projects. RBW envisioned an award that allows winners to share the love and share credit where it's due.

Motorola Prototyping Services manufactured the final artifact: an aluminum mold that can be used to cast an unlimited number of award facsimiles for distribution to design team members, researchers, engineers, clients, and mom & dad! The fun part? The material used for casting could be anything from chocolate to silicone to jello.

To hear Rich Brilliant Willing tell it:As the award took shape in the form of a mold we liked the idea of using metal. We researched a variety of metals and processes to determine options that were appropriate to the context. Our conclusion is that winners will receive an award that is a milled aluminum billet, of a significant size, heft, permanence (which also offers recyclability if ever desired). Winners can cast their own ingots from their aluminum mold, the ingot material is up to the user, wax, chocolate, silicone, there are quite a few options and the trophy itself is sufficiently durable to experiment with.

You can read more about Rich Brilliant Willing's approach to the brief here.

Given that designers are often playful creative types, wax crayons—in orange, of course!—was a particularly fitting material for the first go. So we cranked up the oven and threw a few unwrapped crayons into the mold. The results were so spectacular that we decided to include a supply of crayons with each trophy so winners can cast their own. We expect to be putting up a lot of orange drawings on the Core77 fridge in the near future!

Stay tuned for next year's awards: 2012 opens for entry in January and we'll be bringing you announcements on the program line-up in the coming weeks.