Hankook Tire wins four iF Design Awards

Seoul, South Korea – Hankook Tire has won four iF Design Awards in three categories, including Product, Professional Concept, and Communication at the iF Design Award 2023. Hankook Tire’s innovative design achievements, such as the iON evo, an EV-exclusive tire, and the Wheel Bot, a robotic wheel system, have been recognized at the ceremony.

The first award-winning product is the iON evo, a high-performance tire product from the world’s first full lineup EV- exclusive tire brand iON by Hankook Tire. It provides a comfortable ride with a focus on low noise technology and features a specialized low-noise technology to provide a comfortable ride and adopted a stylish graphic design that embodies the shape of an iON for a futuristic look. Developed with a target audience of premium high-performance electric vehicles from the design stage, iON evo boasts a well-balanced performance with no particular focus on specific features such as low noise, fuel efficiency, and mileage. The iON evo solidified its position as a representative product of the high-performance electric vehicle exclusive tire segment by winning the iF Design Award as well as the Red Dot Award this year.

The Professional Concept award-winning designs are the “Urban Reshaping Concept” and the robotic wheel system Wheel Bot developed as part of the “2022 Design Innovation Project” by Hankook Tire, a research and development program that presents the vision of future mobility.

Reflecting the recent eco-friendly trend, Hankook Tire set up a future smart city centered around humans and the environment with the theme of “Urban Reshaping” and presented a scenario video proposing “Space Shifting Mobility (SSM)”, which is optimized for this environment.

The Wheel Bot featured in the scenario video is a modular robotics system driven by three axes that provides optimal mobility for smart mobility. It received praise for going beyond a virtual scenario by demonstrating the actual driving technology of the Wheel Bot at the “2022 MADE IN HANKOOK” event held last year and the video of the Wheel Bot released on Hankook Tire’s official SNS channel was selected as one of the “Top 10 Best Videos of 2022” by the global industrial design magazine, DesignBoom.

Lastly, in the award-winning ‘Urban Reshaping 2022’ video in the communication category, an SSM was showcased combining a more advanced drive platform with the previously developed Wheel Bot’s structural improvements, along with a mini-van sized pod, representing a futuristic three-dimensional mobility solution that can move from roads to buildings.

The video features SSM, a combination of a mobility platform with electro-magnetic wheels and a minivan-sized Pod, moving three-dimensionally from the road to the interior and exterior of a building in a futuristic manner. The SSM in the video demonstrates flexible space configurations to enhance the energy efficiency, making it suitable for eco-friendly future smart cities. It showcases Hankook Tire’s mobility vision that is optimized for such a city.

Hankook Tire has won 24 awards at the iF Design Award since 2009. In 2016, it received the Gold Award in the Concept Design category in 2016, the highest recognition bestowed by the organization. Since the early 2000s, Hankook Tire has consistently received positive reception for its excellence in design in the three major design awards, iF Design Awards, Red Dot Award, and IDEA.