Winner of the Best of the Best award at the Red Dot Design Award for two consecutive years

KT announced that it won the Best of the Best award for IoT design in the Entertainment category of the Concept section at the 2016 Red Dot Design Award.

This award is the top prize given to only within the top 1% of total entries, and KT achieved the remarkable feat of winning for two consecutive years, following its win in 2015. This year's winning entry, the 'IoT Wi-Fi Speaker,' allows multiple speakers to be connected via Wi-Fi, enabling users to listen to the same music simultaneously in rich 5.1 channel sound in all spaces of the house, such as multiple rooms, the living room, and the kitchen, and can also be controlled by installing an app on a smartphone.

KT spent about six months developing two new characters for a design that fuses characters with IoT technology. To break the stereotype of IoT devices, which often feel somewhat cold and mechanical, the company devised characters that customers would find friendly while simultaneously symbolizing KT. The black 'IO', symbolizing speed, and the white 'IT', symbolizing communication, born in this way, feature various musical instruments to particularly evoke the image of a music speaker.

This entry received favorable reviews for being a new concept design that fuses character-driven design with IoT technology, rather than a simple product design.

In addition to the Red Dot, KT has previously won a main award at the US IDEA for its 'Phone Mouse,' a new concept mouse with a built-in power bank for mobile phones. With this, KT demonstrated its excellent design capabilities in the Red Dot Design Award Product and Concept categories, as well as IDEA, during the first half of 2016.

Despite the constraint that, as a service company, there are relatively few tangible objects to apply design to, KT pursues service design management with the goal of "making everything invisible tangible for the customer." The achievements of this design management have been recognized through approximately 30 design awards over seven consecutive years at Red Dot (Concept, Product, and Communication fields), iF Awards, US IDEA, Japan GD (Good Design), and US Clio Awards, and the company is highly regarded as a global design firm.

Kang Yi-hwan, Senior Vice President of Design at KT’s Marketing Division’s IMC Headquarters, stated, “Service design management, which KT pursues, involves materializing KT’s invisible cutting-edge technology and excellent services in a unique and innovative way. Through this, we will become a company that realizes the world’s No. 1 design in the minds of customers.”