This year, ICE9 Interactive became the first Bangladeshi design firm to win the prestigious Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2015, in Germany. They are also the first Bangladeshi firm to have won the Platinum Award in the ‘A’ Design Award and Competition 2015, another international prestigious award which was handed to them in Italy, earlier in June.
The awards
This is the first time a Bangladeshi company has won either of the awards – let alone winning them two in a row, according to Ahmad Niaz Murshed, one of the founders of ICE9 Interactive.
According to the acceptance letter, Red Dot received 7,451 entries from 53 countries this year, making the Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2015 one of the most highly selective and competitive grounds for a creative award. The Ice9 Interactive team will travel to Germany in November for the formal gala where they will be awarded the prize.
In the ‘A’ Design Award & Competition 2015, ICE9 Interactive won the "Platinum Award" in the category of "Graphics and Visual Communication" and the "Gold Award" in the category of "Generative, Algorithmic and Parametric Design." A total of 15,000 applications were submitted from 180 countries for the A Design Award. Out of them, only nine applications secured the Platinum Winners award, who among others were invited to receive the award in the gala ceremony held in Como, Italy. Nike, Disney, Yahoo, Apple Retail Store, and Samsung are among the winners of this award.
ICE9 Interactive
Niaz, along with his seven partners, started ICE9 Interactive in 2012, as a sister concern to their other firm Maverick Studios. ICE9 is what they call an interactive solutions developer that work with a number of technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and interactive 3D content.
This particular project was ideated by Shafiq Alam of Impact BBDO, in Dubai, and executed by Afeef Zubaer Zaman and Fahim Ahmed of ICE9 Interactive.
The product: a perfect marriage
“Initially, we wanted to do something with ICE9 because we wanted to represent Bangladesh to start the project,” says Shafiq, a consultant for ICE9 who works in Dubai and introduced the ICE9 team to Lebanese musician DJ Sarhi for the branding of his album.
“[It] falls under the interactive content category,” says Afeef. “The idea is very simple: the system itself will generate design, rather than designers always doing it.”
For this product, the ICE9 team used a generative design system to take a snippet from a track of DJ Sarhi, his picture, and the user's location. The system then used these elements to create visual beats which represent momentary glimpses of his music.
“All of the visual beats that the algorithm generated was absolutely unique,” says Fahim. “These system generated visuals were then used for all sort of communication for the album launch of DJ Sarhi.”
But how did a Bangladeshi design technology firm reach Lebanon?
The firm was referred to DJ Sarhi by Shafiq, who has been in the field of design for 13 years, and was trained as an architect. Shafiq currently works in Dubai in the field of advertisement.
And Shafiq aptly sums up the charm of the award-winning project: “Basically, we used technology to generate art. This project was a perfect marriage between technology and art.”
