ICONNN Awards and Keynotes

Design, in its ubiquitous and inter-disciplinary sense, is one of the fastest growing areas of research, education and practice. However, while there are numerous awards for practitioners of design (i.e. designers), there are very few awards to acknowledge and honour outstanding researchers and educators of design. ICONNN awards are a small step to addressing this gap.

Starting from the year 2006, the biennial International Conference series on Research into Design (ICoRD, see details in link: https://design.iith.ac.in/icord25/), the first and currently the largest international conference in India in this area, has introduced two biennial awards in the area of design research and education. The awards are called ICONNN Award (in brief ICON Award), where the acronym ICONNN (pronounced as the word ‘icon’) stands for: ICoRD Outstanding Contribution to desigN scieNce and educatioN. The awards are open to individuals from any country, and are conferred at each ICoRD to two individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of research and/or education in the area of design.
The past awardees include Prof. John Gero of George Mason University, Prof. Amit Ray of Shiv Nadar University, Prof Cees de Bont of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Prof. Sudhakar Nadkarni of Welinkar Institute of Management, Prof. Imre Horvath of Delft University of Technology, Prof. TS Mruthyunjaya of Indian Institute of Science, Prof. Farrokh Mistree of University of Oklahoma, and Prof.Uday Athavankar of IIT Bombay.

The Organising Committee of ICoRD invites the awardees to attend the relevant ICoRD so as to be felicitated IN-PERSON, subject to fulfilment of the following conditions:

• ICONNN awards will be conferred only on those, selected by the Decision Committee, who agree, and are able, to attend the relevant ICoRD to be felicitated in person. No ICONNN award will be conferred in absentia or online.
• Each ICONNN awardee will be invited to, and deliver, an ICONNN keynote in an area of his/her choice at the relevant ICoRD.

For ICoRD’25, the 10th in the conference series, the ICONNN award will comprise the following:

• A personalised Citation and a memento designed exclusively for ICONNN award
• Registration waiver to attend ICoRD’25.
• Travel support to attend ICoRD’25 on a reimbursement basis:
• For awardees from South Asia, it is INR 40,000 (about USD500);
• from Americas, INR 160,000 (about USD2000);
• from Europe, Africa, Oceania INR 120,000 (about USD1500);
• for all other countries it is INR 80,000 (about USD1000).
• Local hospitality for attending the ICoRD’25 (transfer between Hyderabad International Airport and IIT Hyderabad Guest House; and food and accommodation at IIT Hyderabad Guest House for five days including the three days of ICoRD’25 i.e. 8-10 January 2025).

Abstract of the talk:
Shape/CAD models evolved from the need for a formal representation of arbitrary shapes in the 1940s. Today, in the era of digitalization and digital twins, models to capture the shape of products/environments are critical starting points. While digitization of shape models has been achieved, their integration with application models in other phases of the product lifecycle is lacking, preventing the realization of true digitalization. This talk presents work done in IISc to address this gap by incorporating additional information in the traditional shape/CAD model. The first is the feature as an entity carrying domain information as opposed to a modelling primitive. With the advent of
Additive Manufacturing (AM), integrating material information with the shape model becomes important. The third is an attempt to support the early stages of design by integrating
behaviour information in the CAD model. Higher level abstraction of shape and the use of ontology form recurring themes in this transition from a shape model to a product model.

Brief Bio:
B. Gurumoorthy is a Professor in the Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IISc, Bangalore. His research interests are in the areas of CAD, Product Information modelling, Computational Metrology and, Product design and prototyping. He did his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras in 1982 followed by M.E. and Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA in 1984 and 1987 respectively. Two technologies I.e., automatic feature recognition and visual interactive solids developed in his laboratory have been licensed to industry.

Abstract of the talk:
Creativity represents an important facet in design and other domains. Innovation, sometimes referred to as the realisation of value from creativity, is a principal focus for business activity and a significant proportion of value, perhaps in the region of 75%, can be attributed to innovations arising in the previous 5 years. This presentation will consider the fundamentals of creativity, the value of systematic approaches and tools in creativity, innovation and enterprise, and the importance of leadership in design.

Brief Bio:
Peter Childs FREng is the Professorial Lead in Engineering Design, Innovation Design Engineering Professor at Large, and was Founding Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. His general interests include creativity, innovation, design, energy and sustainability, and robotics. He teaches multidisciplinarity and design engineering at Imperial. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Power and Energy and the Journal of Design for Augmented Humanity, Honorary Professor at Guangdong University of Technology and Professor of Excellence at MD-H, Germany, and Founder Director at Q-Bot Ltd and Chair and Director at BladeBUG Ltd.