Design Awards: more than 50 design prizes for products by Eckstein Design
More than 50 design prizes for series products from the industrial design work of Eckstein Design. The award-winning projects, with year and award.
Design Awards
More than 50 international design awards for products that went into series production
Design prizes are not an end in themselves. They are an external judgement on products that have already been through development, manufacturing and the market. That is precisely where their value lies: what is recognised is not a concept but a series product that has to prove itself in use.
Over more than 30 years, working with our clients has produced more than 300 series products. Over 50 of them have received international design prizes. The Red Dot and iF Design directories alone document 21 and 18 awards respectively, the earliest dating from 1993. Added to these is the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany, the official award of the German federal government, for which products are nominated rather than entered. This page shows the award-winning projects, with year, award and a link to the corresponding case study.
Award-winning projects in detail
NECCST Series 1
Red Dot Award 2026, kitchen appliances and accessories category. A premium hand grinder with patented stepless grind adjustment and a zero retention system.
Geuder VIVOS
Golden A' Design Award 2026, Medical Devices and Medical Equipment Design category. An ophthalmic surgery platform bringing vitrectomy, endoillumination and laser therapy together across three configuration levels in one consistent formal language.
Winkhaus blueEvo
Red Dot Design Award 2025, interior design elements category. An electronic door locking system, designed from the product form through the user interface to brand communication.
SIMEON Sim.LED 8000
Red Dot Design Award 2025, medical devices and technology category. A modular surgical light system whose three-sided geometry translates the brand identity into an ergonomically balanced form.
THE GROOVIN' PUTTER
Red Dot Design Award and iF Design Award 2024. A putter for Lübbering in which engineering and design were developed as a single task.
L.ADU pneumatic 150 and electronic 260
Two Red Dot Design Awards in 2021 plus an iF Design Award 2021 for Lübbering's L.ADU series. High-precision drilling machines that also defined the design language of the range.
Roll..Profi Flexipass
Red Dot Design Award and iF Design Award 2021. A cable routing system for Lübbering that makes laying cable around edges and corners simpler and safer.
3M Scotchbond Universal Plus and RelyX Universal
Two Red Dot Design Awards in 2021 for dental products by 3M: the one-handed adhesive bottle with freshness cap and the automix syringe with optimised force transmission. 3M ESPE Scotchbond had already been recognised in 2012.
Robotise JEEVES
Red Dot Design Award 2019, robotics category. A service robot for hospitality and care settings, designed for acceptance in direct contact with guests and staff.
METRAHIT IM XTRA
Red Dot Design Award 2018, industrial devices, machinery and automation category. A digital multimeter for Gossen Metrawatt, designed for safe one-handed operation in the field.
senses TOUCH
Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany 2013 and Red Dot Design Award 2013. An LED pendant light operated through a touch-sensitive surface. The federal award cannot be entered directly; nominations are made by the federal government and the states.
VDW.CONNECT Drive
iF Design Award 2016, Medical and Healthcare category. A cordless endodontic motor for VDW that can be operated on its own or via an app on a tablet.
All awards at a glance
The lists below reflect the current state of the official Red Dot and iF Design directories. They show the range of the work across three decades, from electrical installation and telecommunications in the 1990s through measurement technology and power tools to medical technology and robotics.
Red Dot Design Award
The current state can be verified at any time in the official Red Dot directory.
iF Design Award
The iF Design Award directory lists 18 award-winning entries under Eckstein Design. The full entry is held in the iF Design directory.
Further awards and nominations
Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany
2013 for the LED pendant light senses TOUCH. The Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany was the official design prize of the German federal government. It could not be entered: nominations were made solely by the Federal Ministry of Economics and the economics ministries of the federal states, and only from among products that had already received a recognised design award. Nomination thus required a prior distinction.
Designplus
2010 for the PROFITEST test instrument. Designplus is awarded by the German Design Council and recognises products where design, technology and sustainability are assessed together.
A' Design Award
Golden A' Design Award 2026 in the Medical Devices and Medical Equipment Design category for the Geuder VIVOS ophthalmic surgery platform.
Deutscher Zukunftspreis
The ExacTrac Dynamic system designed for Brainlab was nominated in 2022 for the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the German Federal President's Award for Technology and Innovation. The nomination was for the technology, not the design. It does show, however, the context in which the products we work on sit.
What these awards say about how we work
The award-winning products have little in common. A surgical light, a door locking system, a high-precision drilling machine, a service robot, a coffee grinder. Different industries, different users, different manufacturing processes, and three decades of technical development in between.
What connects them is the starting point: technical complexity meeting high expectations of usability. In every case the real task was not to design a housing but to make a function accessible enough to be understood and used correctly in daily practice. Ergonomics, interaction logic, material choice and manufacturability are not separate disciplines here but a single chain of decisions from the first sketch to series production. That holds for industrial design as much as for medical technology.
What stands out is how often the same clients recur across the years. Several of the award-winning products come from collaborations that extend beyond a single product generation. That tells us more than the prizes themselves.
Awards are a by-product of this way of working. They are never the goal of a project. They are useful nonetheless: for our clients in sales, in brand communication and in markets where a prize is read as a quality signal.
Award-winning projects
NECCST Series 1
Simeon Sim.LED 8000
THE GROOVIN' PUTTER
Frequently asked questions about design awards
What does the Red Dot Design Award stand for?
The Red Dot Award is one of the best-known international design prizes and is presented annually by Design Zentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen. Entries are assessed on criteria including degree of innovation, functionality, ergonomics and design quality. The award in the Product Design category applies to market-ready products, not to concepts.
What is the iF Design Award?
The iF Design Award has been presented since 1953 by iF International Forum Design GmbH in Hanover. An international jury assesses submitted work on criteria including design, function, differentiation and impact. Like the Red Dot Award, it is one of the established references in the industry.
How are design awards decided?
For most prizes, manufacturers or design studios submit products in a category for a fee. An independent jury assesses the entries against published criteria, for many prizes on the basis of physical samples rather than renderings. Award-winning products may then carry the label in their communication, usually for a limited period and under licence.
Who owns the award, the manufacturer or the design studio?
As a rule the product is what receives the award, and the entry is submitted by the manufacturer. Both the manufacturer and the design studio are usually named. The recognition therefore applies to the joint work, which reflects reality: a series product is never created in the design studio alone.
Can one product receive several design awards?
Yes. The prizes are independent competitions with their own juries and categories, so the same product can be entered in several of them. In our portfolio this applies to the putter and to the cable routing system, both of which received the Red Dot Design Award and the iF Design Award in the same year.
Does a design award say anything about commercial success?
Not directly. An award assesses the product, not its sales. It is, however, an independent judgement on design and usability, and in many markets it is read as a quality signal. Studies on the economic value of design show a clear link between consistent design work and company performance: according to the McKinsey study, companies in the top quartile for design performance achieved revenue growth 32 percentage points higher and total return to shareholders 56 percentage points higher than their respective industry averages.