SINGAPORE — Like many good products, the winning design of the second IKEA Singapore’s Young Designer Award was borne from a very practical need. Duane Lye, a fourth-year product design student at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media, found the bathrooms of most apartments so compact, they did not always have space to build storage and partitions. “My friends complained that their clothes are always getting wet; and my fiancee and I have also been looking at HDB flats and we feel that the bathrooms are very small,” he explained.

So he decided to create Obvi8, a storage solution that allows you to hang your clothes and towels within that space, but without them getting wet.

Lye’s Obvi8 beat the other 19 finalists whose prototypes were displayed at the National Design Centre. He won S$1,500 in cash and a trip to Sweden. “It’s a really good and new solution to an existing problem,” IKEA designer David Wahl, one of the three judges at the competition, said of Lye’s design. “I thought it was really smart. I would personally like to see IKEA make this.”

This year’s competition saw 110 entries — a 30 per cent increase from last year — from various institutions including Raffles Design Institute, Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Singapore University of Technlogy and Design. The runners-up were Lim Li Xue and Chiam Yong Sheng Kevin from National University of Singapore’s (NUS) School of Design and Environment who came in second and third, respectively. Lim’s design was for a mirror that doubles as a clock; while Chiam created a wall mirror with hanging facilities. All three students will be offered internships at IKEA Singapore’s Communication and Interior Design department.