Lexus Design Award India offers recognition & honors winners from 10 different categories of design In its fifth year, the Lexus Design Award India 2022 has received over 666 entries from designers and creators across India, despite the challenging pandemic times. The board comprises of eminent designers from the Indian design fraternity who are all set to mentor and assess the rising talent for the Lexus Design Award India 2022 PANEL OF JUDGES: Susmita Mohanty, Anuj Sharma, Nishma Pandit, Anjali Mody, Mukul Goyal and David Nordstrom. PANEL OF MENTORS: Michael Foley, Sandeep Sangaru, Amit Krishn Gulati, Suhasini Paul, Narendra Ghate and Vinay Rao NEW DELHI, MUMBAI and BANGALORE, India, Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Lexus India has announced its esteemed panel of judges and mentors for the Lexus Design Awards India 2022. The proposals put forward by the 666 entries will be evaluated on key design principles – Anticipate, Innovate, Captivate & Happiness for All.

Now in its fifth year, Lexus Design Awards India recognizes exceptional talent among design professionals and individuals whose designs are a combination of design and technology, poised to help craft a better tomorrow. The annual event engages with both established & budding creative talent across the country, aspiring to win the coveted trophy for their state-of-the-art designs.
The skillful panel of judges this year comprises of Nishma Pandit -Co-founder of Ticket Design, a multidisciplinary design consulting firm, Susmita Mohanty – a spaceship designer & space entrepreneur, David Nordstorm – Vice President, Lexus Asia Pacific Division, Anuj Sharma – renowned Fashion designer, Anjali Mody – Serial entrepreneur and Mukul Goyal – Designer under the label Tattva and Mukul Goyal.
“The Lexus Design Award India is certainly a great platform for designers to convert their ideas into reality, encompassing various elements of design and innovation, focusing on making a difference in how tomorrow is viewed. We are thrilled to be the jury for this year and ready to get captivated by the spark of design around us”, comments Nishma Pandit.
Finalists of the Conceptual category will have an exclusive opportunity to receive guidance from renowned designers in India to bring their creations & design to life and develop prototypes of their ideas for final judgment. The esteemed panel of mentors include LDAI trophy designer Michael Foley- founder of Foley Designs, Sandeep Sangaru – designer and entrepreneur at Sangaru Design Objects, Amit Krishn Gulati – Industrial designer and entrepreneur, Suhasini Paul – Toy designer and co-founder of PAUL STUDIO, Narendra Ghate – Chief Designer at Tata Elxsi and Vinay Rao – Design entrepreneur and co-founded Bang Design.
“We are delighted to announce this year’s esteemed panel of jurors and mentors for the Prestigious Lexus Design Award 2022. Lexus Design Awards is a platform attracting several talented designers from all over the country. Mentoring this year’s contestants include mentors who come with immense experience and in-depth knowledge of design & innovation. We believe the fifth edition will be a great success and we are looking forward to seeing this year’s inspiring ideas that will incorporate the key elements of Lexus – Anticipate, Innovate, Captivate & Happiness for All, that will cater to creating a better and advanced tomorrow,” said P.B. Venugopal, President, Lexus India.
Following the mentorship program, the 6 finalists of the Conceptual category will present their projects to the panel of judges for evaluation. The final winners will be announced along with the Established category winners at the Lexus Design Award India event in January 2022.
The Lexus Design Award India is conducted in knowledge partnership with Association of Designers of India – ADI. Emulating the same brand commitment as that of Lexus’, ADI ensures that their efforts are in the direction of promoting best practices in the profession of design in India. ADI is India’s only association, that through its 8 chapters, promotes and strengthens the capabilities of the Indian design professionals & students, as well as presents a unified voice to influence public policy, shape the industry and benefit people at large through design.
Details of the Lexus Design Award India 2021 can be found at www.lexusdesign.in
About Lexus Design Award India (LDAI)
The Lexus Design Award India (LDAI) seeks to recognize and reward the best industrial design executed by Indian designers, institutions, design consultancy firms, and in-house design teams of companies. Good design is defined by LDAI as the synthesis of ergonomic, aesthetic, commercial, industrial, and scientific disciplines to create products that simplify, enrich and better human existence. Lexus, as a brand, has always stood for excellence in design, ergonomics, sustainability, technological superiority, and responsible consumption; and the LDAI will mirror these brand values.
About Lexus Design Award (LDA)
First launched in 2013, the Lexus Design Award is an international design competition that targets up-and-coming creators from around the world. The award seeks to foster the growth of ideas that contribute to society by supporting designers and creators whose works can help to shape a better future. It provides a unique opportunity for six finalists to work with globally recognized designers as a mentor to create prototypes of their designs, and then exhibit them at one of the design calendar’s most important events.
About Lexus
Lexus launched in 1989 with a flagship sedan and a guest experience that helped define the premium automotive industry. In 1998, Lexus introduced the luxury crossover category with the launch of the Lexus RX. The luxury hybrid sales leader, Lexus delivered the world’s first luxury hybrid and has since sold over 1.5 million hybrid vehicles. A global luxury automotive brand with an unwavering commitment to bold, uncompromising design, exceptional craftsmanship, and exhilarating performance, Lexus has developed its lineup to meet the needs of the next generation of global luxury guests and is currently available in over 90 countries worldwide. Lexus associates/team members across the world are dedicated to crafting amazing experiences that are uniquely Lexus, and that excite and change the world.
Website: www.lexusindia.co.in Facebook: @LexusIndia Instagram: @lexus_india Official Hashtag: #LexusDesignAward
Annexure: Pictures and Bios of Judges and Mentors
LDAI 2022- JURORS AND MENTORS
JURY PROFILES
Susmita Mohanty
Susmita Mohanty is a spaceship designer and the only space entrepreneur in the world to have started companies on 3 different continents. She is the CEO of EARTH2ORBIT, India’s first private start-up that played a pivotal role in opening up the US launch market for India. She has co-founded two other companies, MOONFRONT in San Francisco in 2001 and LIQUIFER in Vienna in 2004. Prior to turning entrepreneur, she worked for the Space Station Program at Boeing in California and did a short stint at NASA. 
In 2019, Susmita was selected as one of BBC’s 100 Women laureates inspiring and influencing a female-led future. In 2017, she was featured on cover of Fortune Magazine. In 2012, she was voted into Financial Times’ list of “25 Indians to Watch”. In 2016, she was nominated to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council for Space Technologies. In 2005, Susmita was honored on Capitol Hill in Washington DC with the International Achievement Award.
Educated in India, France, and Sweden, Susmita holds multiple degrees including a PhD. She seamlessly straddles the worlds of technology, business, design, architecture, and art. An ardent traveler and explorer, she is probably the only person in the world to have visited the Arctic and Antarctica, on invitation. She hopes that someday, she can take long sorties on the Moon, even sit back, relax and watch the Earth float by.
Anuj Sharma
Fashion designer Anuj Sharma (IND) works mainly in areas of craft development and sustainability. Sharma’s other areas include teaching fashion and understanding human behavior with the help of fashion. He has previously shown his collection in Japan, UK, Sweden, and Bangladesh. He was also a regular at Lakme fashion week in Mumbai. Anuj Sharma entered into fashion with his debut collection called Sunday Market in 2007, after his post-graduation studies in Apparel Design at the renowned design school, National Institute of Design (NID), India and a Masters in High-performance Sportswear Design at the University of Derby, UK, for which he was awarded the Charles Wallice India trust scholarship in 2002. 
Anuj Sharma has come up with a unique method to construct clothes without any machine, tools or stitches technique. It is titled Button Masala. The method has led to the Button Masala collection, which has been shown internationally. He has taught the technique of Button Masala to over 20.000 people across the world. He was invited to give a TED talk on the method of his button masala collection in TED x Delhi and he was awarded the Most Innovative Collection of the Year Award 2009 for his collection Button Masala at Marie Claire Made in India Fashion Awards.
Nishma Pandit
An experienced designer, Nishma is co-founder at Ticket Design a multidisciplinary design consulting firm. She has over the years designed solutions across domains, lead teams, and successfully implemented winning strategies. Under her leadership Ticket Design has established itself as a respected design consulting firm, with a wide variety of award-winning products launched in the Indian as well as international markets. Some of the awards that Ticket Design has won are Red Dot Product Design Award, Lexus Design Award, CII award for UX design, Silver award at US Appliance Design, India Star and Asia Star presidential award to name a few.
Nishma is an alumnus of NID (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad), Asia’s premier design school. Nishma, started her career as an industrial designer with Tata Johnson Controls, designing passenger car seating and going on to design several products for Bluestar, Whirlpool, Siemens, Honeywell etc. She has been a speaker at various design conferences sharing her work experience, and is also invited as a jury for various national and international design awards like DFC (Design for change competition) and Core77 Design awards to name a few.
Anjali Mody
Anjali Mody is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for design. She kindled her love for design under the incomparable guidance of Interior Guru Pinakin Patel and the Late Shri Dashrat Patel. After earning her degree in Industrial Design from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, she honed her skills in Providence and New York before returning to Mumbai in 2010.
Over the past 11 years Anjali has co-founded creative agency Skarma in 2010 as well as a design practice- Josmo in Late 2010 where she remains Founder and Creative Director. Anjali has recently expanded her practice to Goa where she now resides.
Josmo- her current focus has been a growing 11 year brand that specialises in bringing good design within reach to a larger Indian audience.
Her 6000 sq ft retail store and 30,000 sq ft factory are the recent feather in her hat making her overall dream of ‘Good design within reach’, a beautiful reality.
Mukul Goyal
Mukul Goyal’s distinctive creative expression successfully walks the line between art and design, aesthetic and function. Mukul sells his products under two labels Tattva- a range of Hardware & his eponymous label Mukul Goyal, which consists of Objects for the home. The products sell from more than 200 stores in India & in about 30 countries internationally. His Bespoke collaborations of installations, artworks & architectural features find pride of place in prestigious projects for various private and public spaces. The Studio continues to research and experiment with techniques, language and objects creating an eclectic line of accent pieces viz. furniture, lighting, screens and artworks Mukul has studied Engineering at IIT Kanpur, Product Design at NID, Ahmedabad and Domus Academy, Milan. He has taught at various Design schools such as NID Ahmedabad, RMIT Melbourne, SPA Delhi. Mukul operates out of his studio workshop in Gurugram, India.
David Nordstrom
David Nordstrom is the Vice President, Lexus Asia Pacific Division. He drives the brand’s marketing strategy in the region and in this role, is also the guardian of the brand’s development through product planning and training. An international marketer with a keen eye for the finer things, David applies these sensibilities to the evolution of the Lexus brand.
MENTOR PROFILES
Michael Foley
Michael Foley runs an independent studio ‘Foley Designs’ known for its innovative thinking processes, zeal for design, originality of thought and the ability to use market and consumer understanding to create new benchmarks in design. Foleydesigns has been involved in landmark projects such as the design of the Queen’s Baton for the 2010 Commonwealth Games and several world-class products for the Indian and global market. Foleydesigns is a product design and strategy company with a legacy in consulting services. It is known for its innovative thinking processes, originality of thought and the ability to use market and consumer understanding to create new benchmarks in design.
Sandeep Sangaru
Sandeep Sangaru is a multidisciplinary designer, educator, entrepreneur, wanderer and a nomad by nature. He studied Industrial design specializing in Furniture design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad with a background in Mechanical Engineering. To mention a few, he is a proud Recipient of the Red Dot Design Award- Best of the best 2009, The Design for Asia-Grand Award 2011, The British Council’s Young Creative Entrepreneur Award – Design for Social Impact in 2012 and the recent JSW+AD Craft Prize for Contemporary Craftmanship 2020.
His work at Sangaru is informed by a significant commitment to local material and local knowledge. He loves to capture, communicate and create, through his work of collaborative experiments with different communities practicing the craft of handmade in India and around the world. To make all these explorations tangible he founded Sangaru Design Objects which co-creates working with craftsmen, he relooks and innovates ways of working with the age old but relevant traditional methods of making by hand that connects a human way of living with local resources. Along the way, as a team they are creating new knowledge, innovations and markets to inspire the younger generation to practice and disseminate these sustainable traditional methods.
Amit Krishn Gulati
Amit Krishn Gulati is an award-winning industrial designer, entrepreneur and educator with a multifaceted oeuvre encompassing New Product Development, Healthcare, Branding, Built Environments and Retail Experiences.
Amit completed the post-graduate programme in Industrial Design from the prestigious National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad in 1995 and is the co-founder of Incubis, one of India’s respected architecture, design and innovation-consulting companies with several Fortune 500 clients.
Amit is passionate about mentoring entrepreneurs and works closely with many start-ups. He is one of the founding investors at Barista, India’s pioneering espresso retailer, Abisko, a solar solutions venture and Eye-Q, a successful and fast-growing chain of affordable eye hospitals. Amit is actively engaged in creating design awareness and has served on the CII National Committee on Design for several years and is the Vice President-National Executive Council of the Association of Designers of India (ADI).
Amit is a visiting faculty at NID Ahmedabad, School of Planning & Architecture – Delhi, Anant University -Ahmedabad, Vedica Scholars – New Delhi, ISPP and the Naropa Fellowship – Ladakh. He is a member of the Senate at NID Ahmedabad and on the Board Of Studies at Ambedkar University – Delhi and at Anant University.
Suhasini Paul
Suhasini Paul is an eminent Toy Designer, alumni of NID, TEDx speaker and a recipient of the “Designpreneur Award” from Shri Narendra Modi. She is a Co-founder of PAUL STUDIO. For the past 16 years, she has designed over 300+ toys and products for her clients across 19 countries, which are launched every year at various Toy Fairs across the globe. She also designs toys for Kinder Joy, Disney, Hape and Chhota Bheem.
Narendra Ghate
Narendra Ghate is the Chief Designer at Tata Elxsi. In his current role, he spearheads the Research & Strategy, User Experience and the Service Design domains. In a career spanning over 23 years, Narendra has been associated with Tata Elxsi since 1997. He is a distinguished alumnus from the Industrial Design Center, IIT Mumbai, an international speaker and thought leader on user experience and service design.
 He has led design projects for brands across the world and across industries, including automotive, rail, consumer electronics and technology. 
Narendra holds a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, Masters in Industrial Design from IDC – IIT Bombay, and an executive MBA from IIM Bangalore.
He is one of the founder members of the design practice at Tata Elxsi and was instrumental in turning the Industrial design studio to be the largest design house in Asia. Narendra is leading a team of over 100 designers. He brings a wealth of experience and is responsible to deliver design projects in Experience Design, Branding and Graphics, New Technologies (AR, AI, VR), Service Design and Consumer Research for leading global clients.
Vinay Rao
Vinay Rao is an Indian design entrepreneur and has been at the forefront of the product design field for the last two decades.
The product development and incubation firm he co-founded, Bang Design, has been the collaborative creative force and instigator behind many of today’s most disruptive and game-changing products and experiences, across industries, across the world. The Moonwalkr Helmet, Elisar Visual Field Analyser, Slick Ultra-Rugged Technology for Motorola, Several medical device brands, and smartphones and wearables for Verizon.
When he launched the firm over 20 years ago, the business world was yet to understand the value of design. Good Design is the synthesis of the soft things – human experience, contemporary culture, form and vision – and the hard things – capital investment, materials and manufacturing, technical performance and maintenance, and ecological sustainability. To this end, Vinay pioneered the co-venture, design-for-equity model in the design industry, a systematic approach to collaborative value creation and sharing.
He has been obsessed with the future ever since he was a kid drawing video games and building lego spaceships. His goal for the future is to increase the GDP of product design in the world. The path to that goal is a seamless interlocution around human values, between a core technology and the design that makes the object delightful.
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