iF DESIGN AWARD announces New Sustainability Criteria

iF Design, a respected member of the international design community since 1953, and host of the prestigious iF DESIGN AWARD, is announcing a significant update to its 2025 award. Sustainability will now represent one-fifth of the judging criteria across the Award’s nine design disciplines and 82 categories, evaluated equally alongside Idea, Form, Function and Differentiation. As part of the organization’s ongoing commitment to excellence and impact in design, the iF DESIGN AWARD has replaced the former Impact criteria, which included commercial considerations, with Sustainability, which focuses entirely on social and environmental factors. With this, iF Design is underlining its ongoing commitment to elevating this important conversation about sustainable design and working to help usher positive change in the industry and beyond.

In adjusting the award criteria of one of the world’s largest independent design awards, iF Design is showcasing their larger commitment to impact through design that has been central to the mission for over seventy years. iF Design has also appointed Lisa Gralnek as the company’s Global Head of Sustainability and Impact, a role she holds in tandem to her position as the iF Design USA Inc. Managing Director. With over 15 years of experience working in social and environmental topics across a range of industries and geographies, Lisa’s expertise has been instrumental in implementing these changes at iF Design and helping shepherd what iF Design believes will be a new and better design future.

To help integrate core elements of environmental and social impact into the jury’s evaluation process for 2025, iF Design has established a Sustainability Working Group, made up of seven (soon to be eight) cross-disciplinary professionals who lent their expansive international expertise to help prioritize topics and define specific questions to which every Award entry is asked to respond. In addition, these experts will provide proactive and consultatory feedback to support jurors as they go through the rigorous two-step online and in-person jurying process. This initial Sustainability Working Group includes major figures in sustainability, including Diana Verde Nieto, Founder & former CEO of Positive Luxury- home of the Butterfly Mark, and author of the recently-released book Reimagining Luxury: How to Build a Sustainable Future for Your Brand; Joe Brown, Former Editor-in-Chief of Popular Science and Founder of one5c - a media platform dedicated to climate action; Kenny Arnold, Senior Manager of Service Design at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation USA - the preeminent global organization focused on the transition to a circular economy; Steve Alagna, Senior Sustainability Packaging Engineer at Dell Technologies - a recognized leader in advanced corporate sustainability; Teun Van Wetten, Design Director & Head of Sustainability at Accenture Industry - reimagining how products, infrastructure and services are designed and engineered; Richard Trigg, Design Partner at Tangent - a London-based design firm working with clients to build future-ready digital experiences, products, and capabilities with a focus on people and planet; and Michael Lanz, an award-winning industrial designer and longtime iF DESIGN AWARD Jury Chairperson, now a Partner at Vagabund Moto.

Each expert on the Sustainability Working Group has demonstrated a strong commitment to elevating sustainability in the design industry and brings specific expertise to bear in their work with iF Design. In addition to general research and supporting jurors during the jurying processes, the Sustainability Working Group collaborated with the iF Design Team and other external experts to develop additional questions for participants to answer in the 2025 application. Tailored to each discipline and/or category, these questions have been carefully vetted to ensure they address and showcase efforts against highest impact topics. Additionally, participants can indicate if their submissions are accredited by any of the 75 internationally-recognized social or environmental certifications included in the updated list for 2025.

“We no longer live in a world where we can relegate sustainable design to its own category, and evaluate it separately,” says Lisa Gralnek. “Great design - be it a product, packaging, platform, place, or policy - should be sustainable. I believe in the power of design to push our world forward, and if we as one of the world’s largest and most prestigious design awards won’t take this step, who will?”

Commenting on these changes for the iF DESIGN AWARD 2025, Uwe Cremering, CEO of iF International Forum Design GmbH in Germany, states, “Our goal is to fully integrate principles of environmental stewardship and social equity into the core evaluation criteria of the iF DESIGN AWARD as part of a multi-year journey to help determine the true social and environmental impact of our participants' projects, while also creating design success stories that positively influence the market and society at large.”

Sustainability is a crucial component of the overall evaluation across all submissions, reflecting iF Design’s deeply held belief that “as designers, we have a responsibility to make the world a better place… still”, as stated by iconic industrial designer Dieter Rams this past April, during the iF DESIGN AWARD NIGHT in Berlin, Germany, where he received iF Design’s first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award. As one of the most prestigious independent design institutions in the world, iF Design aims to honor the design studios, brands and manufacturers entering the annual iF DESIGN AWARD who are innovating for an even better future. By fully integrating sustainability into its primary award criteria, iF Design aims to inspire the design community to meet the expectations of today’s consumers and raise the bar for the next.

Applications for the iF DESIGN AWARD 2025 are open until November 6.

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