Press Release
Op.2-3 Trophy by Seungbum Ma Receives the Silver A' Design Award in Awards, Prize and Competitions Design
The international grand jury of the 2025 - 2026 A' Design Award & Competition recognizes Seungbum Ma for awards, prize and competitions design
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COMO, Italy, April 15, 2026 /DesignNewswire/ A' Design Award & Competition has announced that Op.2-3 Trophy by Seungbum Ma, designed for Design House, has been granted the Silver A' Design Award in the Awards, Prize and Competitions Design category. The result belongs to the 2025 - 2026 A' Design Award & Competition and was reached through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who scored anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.
What the Silver A' Design Award Means
The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.
Regarding Op.2-3 Trophy
This trophy, designed for the 2024 Seoul Living Design Fair, draws inspiration from basic architectural elements such as columns, beams, and slabs, reinterpreted through contemporary materials and fabrication methods. Crafted in acrylic, it reflects the logic of traditional Korean joinery while exploring light, shadow, and material change. The form shifts with angle and illumination, at times glowing, reflecting, or casting colored shadows, combining structural clarity with sensory depth through precise assembly research.
About Seungbum Ma
Studio SMA transforms everyday life into meaningful experiences that extend beyond sensory stimulation to provoke intellectual reflection. Each work leaves subtle traces, inviting viewers to infer intention and process, fostering curiosity and engagement. The studio defamiliarizes the familiar while carefully translating ideas into material and form, pursuing beauty with an inexplicable allure. Working across architecture, interiors, furniture, objects, installations, research, writing, and film, Studio SMA explores diverse sensory dimensions of human experience.
Award Record
With this recognition, Seungbum Ma is a winner of 1 A' Design Award.
About the A' Award, Trophy, Prize and Competition Design Award
The A' Accolade Design Award is an international design competition recognizing designs of trophies, prizes and accolades by leading designers worldwide. It is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to accolade designers, trophy designers, prize designers and competition design experts from all countries. Typical entries include awards, prizes, competitions, contests, medals and trophies. The awarded accolade designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/accolade
About A' Design Award & Competition
Organized annually since 2008, A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The philanthropic mission of the A' Design Award is to advance society through good design, by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Nominations are peer reviewed and evaluated anonymously by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. Eligible laureates receive the A' Design Prize, which includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, uploading a work and receiving a preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. More information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com
Press Resources
- Winner Page: https://designers.org/173325
- A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/173325
- Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!173325
- Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/364643
- Further Information from the Laureate: https://studiosma.work/Trophy-Design-for-SLDF-2024
Media Contact
Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953
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Fact Sheet
The Work
- Project
- Op.2-3 Trophy
- Function
- Trophy
- Category
- Awards, Prize and Competitions Design
- Discipline
- Service Design
- Industry
- Arts and Branding & Advertising
- Colors
- White Smoke, Black, Light Gray, Dim Gray and Midnight Blue
- Images
- 5
- Client
- Design House
The Recognition
- Laureate
- Seungbum Ma
- Country
- Republic of Korea
- Recognition
- Silver A' Design Award
- Edition
- 2025 - 2026
- Design ID
- #173325
Credits
- Team
- Euijung Sung and Eunbin Lim
- Image Credits
- All photos by Yoon Park.
Design Details
- Unique Properties
- This is the trophy design for the 2024 Seoul Living Design Fair. Inspired by fundamental architectural elements, such as beams, columns, and slabs, the design reinterprets traditional Korean joinery using acrylic. The trophy’s form responds to light and angle: at times glowing and casting stained-glass-like reflections, at others becoming a dark mirror or a silent, solid mass. Three versions were created—Special, Product, and Space Prizes—each rendered in RGB hues symbolizing light itself.
- Inspiration
- This project explores the universal language of architecture to evoke new experiences and meanings. Fundamental elements, such as beams, columns, walls, and floors, are reconfigured with contemporary materials to defamiliarize the everyday and invite renewed reflection. By reinterpreting traditional joinery through modern techniques, the work honors history while opening paths toward the future.
- Research
- Under a tight timeline, it was necessary to explore multiple formal alternatives for the trophy while simultaneously studying the complex joinery details at a small scale using various materials.
- Challenge
- Wood was fragile, while rigid paper allowed for easy assembly but presented issues with warping and finish. Aluminum lost its precision and deformed during cutting. While 3D printing offered structural stability, it was excluded due to its incompatibility with the interlocking design language. Ultimately, acrylic was chosen for its ability to transmit and reflect light, casting colored shadows while glowing on its own. However, tests were required to determine the optimal tolerances for assembly without breakage, as well as to identify suitable colors and levels of transparency.
- Realization and Technology
- This project also served as an experiment in translating architectural and furniture joinery techniques into a smaller scale. It involved a series of tests to determine tolerances that allow precise acrylic assembly without breakage, along with studies to identify the optimal colors and levels of transparency. The final outcome was achieved through extensive exploration of transparency, translucency, opacity, reflectivity, dyeing, tinting, and color mixing.
- Operation and Interaction
- Placed by a sunlit window, it takes on entirely different forms and impressions depending on the time, weather, and the viewer’s perspective.
- Project Duration and Location
- The project started in January and finished in February 2024 in Seoul, and was exhibited in the Seoul Living Design Fair 2024 in March.
- Specifications
- Width 103 mm x Depth 103 mm x Height 323 mm
- Keywords
- architectural object, architectural trophy, trophy
