2026 Winners Announced
- Published on: 12 October 2026
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Great design begins when someone notices that the way things are done is not the same as the way they have to be. That instinct to question, to listen and to act is what the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards set out to celebrate under this year’s theme, Design that Leads.
Design leadership surpasses size, scale and budget. It comes from clarity of purpose and the courage to challenge the status quo. This year’s Award Winners show how design can influence behaviour, drive innovation, strengthen communities and create measurable commercial and social value.
At the Awards Ceremony in Sydney last week, we came together to honour the designers, innovators and visionaries behind this year’s standout work, and to recognise what happens when purpose is matched with the conviction to act.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing the stories behind this year’s Winners and the thinking that set their work apart.
The full list of Winners is available in the Good Design Index. Read on for this year’s top honours.
2026 Australian Good Design Award of the Year and Australian Good Design Award for Sustainability
In 2026, the Jury recognised one project for both of this year’s top accolades, with SolShare taking out the Australian Good Design Award of the Year and the Australian Good Design Award for Sustainability.
SolShare – Allume Energy
SolShare is a standout example of design opening up the clean energy transition to the people who were left out of it. Apartment residents share a roof but have had no practical way to share its solar. SolShare changes that, connecting a single rooftop system to up to 15 apartments and directing power in real time to where it is needed most, without new meters, retailers or building overhauls.
Designed in Australia and manufactured in Melbourne, SolShare has connected more than 10,000 apartments across three continents, delivered 23GWh of solar and helped residents save an average of 30-40% on their electricity bills. It also created an entirely new product category in the standards, the Inverter Power Sharing Device, and secured $6.8 million in export revenue this year.
SolShare – Winner of the 2026 Australian Good Design Award of the Year and Australian Good Design Award for Sustainability. Image: Supplied
Australian Design Prize
Murray Hunter
Murray Hunter is the founder of Design + Industry (D+I), now part of Capgemini, and one of the people who built Australian Industrial Design into an industry of global standing.
Founded in 1987, D+I has grown into Australia’s largest industrial design and engineering consultancy, with more than 80 designers and engineers across Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle, taking high-technology business, medical and consumer products from concept through to production. Under Murray’s leadership, the team has won more than 230 awards worldwide, including multiple Good Design Awards of the Year and Good Design Team of the Year.
With a Master’s degree in Industrial Design from the Royal College of Art in London and more than 45 years of international experience, Murray has built long-term partnerships with world-leading organisations, research institutions and start-ups across Australia, Asia, the USA and Europe. The Australian Design Prize recognises a career-long impact on Australian design.
Murray Hunter – Winner of 2026 Australian Design Prize. Image: Supplied
Australian Good Design Team of the Year
Outerspace
Based in Melbourne with a satellite studio in San Diego, Outerspace is a multidisciplinary design and engineering consultancy of more than 25 specialists across Industrial Design, mechanical, electronic, firmware and systems engineering.
Led by an Industrial Designer, the team holds design intent and engineering reality in the same room, so what is conceived can be built, and the original idea survives the production journey.
That culture is deliberate: a meritocracy of ideas, neurodiversity treated as a design asset, cross-disciplinary training, and a commitment to understanding a client’s business problem before proposing a response. Its dedicated automotive department, built by bringing talent from the former Holden design studio into the Australian ecosystem, has added automotive-grade precision to every sector the team serves.
Outerspace – 2026 Good Design Team of the Year Award. Image: Supplied
Women in Design Award
Bonnie Shaw
As Chief Innovator at the Municipal Association of Victoria, Bonnie Shaw leads MAVlab, supporting all 79 Victorian councils to move from reactive service delivery to anticipatory, system-wide practice. Her mission, in her own words, is to ‘throw a better party’: to create the conditions for joyful collaboration that people actually want to be part of.
Trained in landscape architecture and urban design, Bonnie began her career creating the game and global ‘party’ Snap-Shot-City, which led to fellowships in London and at MIT. She went on to help establish Australia’s first Smart Cities Office, co-found AI start-up Place Intelligence, launch the Data Informed Design conference and found the Because Women Network.
Her research as Professor of Practice at RMIT explores the cognitive and behavioural impacts of chronic stress on decision-making and leadership.
Bonnie Shaw – Winner of 2026 Women in Design Award. Image: Supplied
Michael Bryce Patron’s Award
DFV Specialist Support field – ThirdStory
Specialist domestic and family violence services do some of the most complex work in the country, and are often the most isolated and least heard. ThirdStory, commissioned by the Paul Ramsay Foundation, used design to change that, convening 31 services into a learning network that built shared knowledge and a collective voice.
A parallel network of 27 First Nations-led services was convened separately by ResearchCrowd, so that insights could travel between the two without collapsing the distinction between them.
Safety protocols were co-developed before engagement began, and trauma-informed methods gave people different ways to take part. The network’s recommendations were publicly attributed as the basis for a $10.2 million funding round supporting 17 cross-sector collaborations, and the approach is now being applied in other sectors.
DFV Learning Network – Winner of 2026 Michael Bryce Patron’s Award. Image: Supplied
Indigenous Design Award
Ikuntji Designs – Ikuntji Artists
Ikuntji Designs is the fashion label of Ikuntji Artists, a remote Aboriginal art centre in Haasts Bluff, NT, operating since 1992. No art centre had established its own clothing label built around authentic cultural stories. Ikuntji did, with artists holding creative authority, receiving direct royalties and sharing in every commercial decision.
Every design carries Tjukurrpa, ancestral knowledge of Country worn on the body. Led by Gomeroi creative director Anastasia Keshan and governed by a board of five local Aboriginal directors, the label now produces around 10,000 metres of fabric a year on natural fibres.
Fashion and textiles account for two-thirds of the art centre’s revenue and support more than 50 artists, on runways from Sydney to New York.
Ikuntji Designs – Winner of 2026 Indigenous Design Award. Ikuntji Artist Hayley Dodd walks Melbourne Fashion Week 2023 wearing a dress featuring her Dalhousie Hot Springs design. Photo by Naomi Rahim.
Powerhouse Design Award
Next-Generation SiteHive Hexanode family – SiteHive with Xentronis and DeepDish
The Next-Generation SiteHive Hexanode family brings dust, noise and vibration monitoring into compact, modular devices. They’re designed to be deployed quickly and used by non-experts.
Shaped by more than five years of research and field feedback, the range delivers a world-first dust monitor that stays accurate in high humidity, an omnidirectional acoustic dome built with rigid-flex PCB technology, and in-field calibration to NATA standards.
The result is real-time, shareable data that builds trust between industry, regulators and communities, with users estimating a 50% or greater reduction in the cost of managing environmental impact.
SiteHive Hexanode – Winner of 2026 Powerhouse Design Award. Image: Supplied
Automotive Design Award
This year’s Automotive Design Award recognises two standout vehicles from the Product Design, Automotive and Transport Design Category: one for exterior design and the other for interior design.
Automotive Exterior Design Award
Hyundai IONIQ 6 N – Hyundai
The Hyundai IONIQ 6 N is a streamlined electric sports sedan that balances aerodynamic efficiency with performance-led function. Its motorsport-inspired form, including a swan-neck rear wing, communicates its purpose clearly, inside and out.
Beneath the surface, the 478kW dual-motor AWD sedan is built around driver engagement, with technologies such as N Active Sound+ and N e-Shift delivering a multi-sensory EV experience. Hyundai also points to recycled materials, bio-based finishes and a Design for Recycling strategy on the path to carbon neutrality by 2045.
Hyundai IONIQ 6 N – Winner of 2026 Automotive Exterior Design Award. Image: Supplied
Automotive Interior Design Award
BMW iX3 Neue Klasse – BMW
The all-new Neue Klasse BMW iX3 marks a confident evolution of the brand for the electric era.
Its cabin is designed around the digital experience rather than layered with screens, led by BMW Panoramic iDrive, which projects key information across the full width of the windscreen, directly in the driver’s line of sight.
Reduced surfacing and simplified signature elements give the interior a calmer, cleaner feel. Traditional chrome is replaced by illuminated features, and recycled textiles and secondary materials show circularity expressed through aesthetics.
BMW iX3 Neue Klasse – Winner of 2026 Automotive Interior Design Award. Image: Supplied
Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design
Myodot – Kanishk Aggarwal
The Robert Pataki Award celebrates design that genuinely improves lives in the Healthcare sector.
Myodot is a neuromuscular tracking ecosystem for rehabilitation, built around a 36mm wearable that combines surface EMG and spatially resolved NIRS to give patients real-time haptic and visual biofeedback. Predictive recovery analytics and a clinician insight layer then turn raw motor-unit data into standardised reports and longitudinal trends.
Magnetic stickers replace single-use hydrogels, letting people with limited dexterity snap the device into the same clinical position every time while cutting skin irritation and waste. Designed by Kanishk Aggarwal, who is still a student, Myodot is being developed with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance and Remarkable Tech, and automates NDIS compliance reporting for clinicians.
Myodot – Winner of 2026 Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design. Image: Supplied
Livio Bonollo Award for Longevity
Cochlear Nucleus 24 Contour Hearing Implant – Cochlear Limited
The Livio Bonollo Award for Longevity celebrates designs built to last. The Cochlear Nucleus 24 Contour hearing implant, designed and developed by the Cochlear Design and Engineering Team, is a product conceived not for years of use, but to serve its recipient for a lifetime.
Unlike products designed around replacement cycles, the implanted component is intended to stay with its recipient for the long term, performing reliably within the human body over decades while the external technologies around it continue to evolve.
First recognised with the Australian Design Award of the Year in 2000, the Nucleus 24 Contour brought the electrode array closer to the auditory nerve in a smaller, low-profile implant suited to a broad range of recipients. More than 25 years on, it remains an enduring example of design that considers not merely the life of the product, but the lifetime of the person who depends on it.
Cochlear Nucleus 24 Contour Hearing Implant – Winner of 2026 Livio Bonollo Award for Longevity. Image: Supplied
2026 BEST IN DISCIPLINE
New for 2026, Best in Discipline honours the top project from each design category.
- Built Environment – City Square Ceremonial Gathering Space – Designed by Greenshoot Consulting in Collaboration with Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy, commissioned by CYP Cross Yarra Partnership and Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority, Metro
- Communication Design – Sydney Children’s Hospital Placemaking & Environmental Graphics – Designed by Frost*collective (Architect: Billard Leece Partnership), commissioned by Frost*collective
- Concept Design – SoilRevive – Designed by Liu Chia-Yi, Chen Yen-Chun and Liu He-Ping, advised by Prof. Kai-Chu Li, commissioned by Liu Chia-Yi
- Design Research – Collaborative Research, Learning and Action with the DFV Specialist Support Field – Designed by ThirdStory, commissioned by Paul Ramsay Foundation
- Design Strategy – Designing the Intellectual Edge: A Strategy for Future Defence Learning – Designed by Karla Straker, Cara Wrigley, Genevieve Mosely, Kirsti Tenni and Peter Rudledge, commissioned by Australian Defence College
- Digital Design – Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui – Wellington Central Library – Designed by Journey Digital, commissioned by Wellington City Council
- Engineering Design – Flow Super Lifter – Designed by Flow, commissioned by Flow / Beeinventive
- Fashion and Textiles – FabPatch – Designed by FabPatch, commissioned by FabPatch
- Next Gen (Under 30s) – Bush Cradle – Designed by Xavier Earls, commissioned by Xavier Earls and Monash University
- Policy Design – Advancing Responsible AI Innovation in Local Government – Designed by MAVlab, Municipal Association of Victoria, City of Greater Dandenong and Portable, commissioned by National Housing Taskforce
- Product Design – SolShare (2026 Good Design Award of the Year) – Designed by Allume Energy and Trike, commissioned by Allume Energy
- Product Design – ICONS – Designed by Industrial By Nature, commissioned by Industrial By Nature
- Service Design – Making Nature Count – Designed by Seabin Pty Ltd, commissioned by Seabin Pty Ltd
- Social Impact – Vanuatu National Warning System: A Sovereign Digital Lifeline – Designed by What Works, commissioned by SPREP (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme), client: VMGD (Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department)
Congratulations to all of this year’s Winners across every category, from the Good Design Award Winners and Gold Award recipients to those celebrated as Best in Class, through to SolShare, which takes home both the Australian Good Design Award of the Year and the Australian Good Design Award for Sustainability.
The full list of 2026 Winners can be found on the Good Design Winner’s Index, where the breadth of design leadership on show this year is well worth a closer look.
Good Design Australia extends its thanks to every entrant, collaborator and supporter who put their work forward this year, and to the wider design community for leading with design.
We look forward to sharing the stories behind this year’s Winners in the weeks ahead, and to seeing where design propels us next.
