LTD’s first Design Jury put four manufacturers on the spot. Nine jurors sat across from Al Dhow, Lutron, Office Solutions and Acoulite on 6th August at our premises, and each brand faced the same run of questions and scoring in the room.
The format exists to fix something the industry has quietly accepted for years. Lunch-and-learns and product showcases tend to end where the real conversation should start, a room nods along, questions stay polite, and the dialogue rarely extends far enough to have any consequence. A jury changes that math. Putting a brand in front of nine specifiers from different disciplines, hospitality, workplace, residential, education, healthcare, and asking them to score rather than simply listen, forces feedback that’s transparent, specific, and impossible to soften after the fact.
Each entry was scored across five criteria by all nine jurors, then the highest and lowest scores were dropped before the remaining seven were averaged, a method borrowed from sports judging that keeps a single juror’s outlier from swinging the result. What’s left is a set of scores shaped by consensus rather than any one perspective. Below is how each of the four entries fared, with the full jury breakdown one click away.
Jury: Peter Mishreky, Rahul Shankwalker, Tala Tadros, Bianca Van Der Merwe, Mansi Tewari, Sandra Gillet, Jay Basiga, Srdjan Vidakovic and Milica Didić.
Panel Score: 44/50 · scored by 7 of 9 jurors
Vitra’s ID Chair Concept has been in the making since 1988, the product of an ongoing collaboration between the brand and designer Antonio Citterio. Rather than a single chair, it’s a configurable system: a choice of backrests from the perforated, airy ID Air to the fully upholstered ID Soft, paired with different arms, bases and a range of fabrics through the FlowMotion mechanism. That range is the point. The same underlying chair can suit an open-plan floor, a management office or a boardroom without ever feeling like a different product wearing different clothes.
Aviena — Lutron
Panel Score: 42/50 · scored by 6 of 8 jurors
Aviena is Lutron’s answer to a familiar tension in smart lighting control: the more capable the system, the less it tends to look like anything worth noticing. Hand-finished in solid brass with a weighted mechanical toggle, the keypad is built to feel like a heritage light switch while running on Lutron’s HomeWorks platform. It comes in seven Signature Metal finishes and configurations of up to four toggles, with custom engraving available for each. Ben Bard, Vice President of Lutron, described it as pairing “the timeless beauty of heritage design with Lutron’s legacy of innovation.”
Amtico Decor — Amtico, presented by Office Solutions
Panel Score: 43/50 · scored by 7 of 9 jurors
Amtico’s Décor collection takes its cue from traditional ceramic tile work, translating Victorian-era patterns into hand-crafted, precision-cut LVT flooring. Every tile is individually cut and bevelled, made to order, with a 1mm wear layer and a 20-year commercial warranty behind it. The appeal sits in the contradiction it resolves: the look and warmth of decorative tile, without the installation complexity or the cold underfoot feel that usually comes with it.
spectRAL — Nown, presented by Acoulite
Panel Score: 43/50 · scored by 7 of 9 jurors
spectRAL is Nown’s custom-perforated architectural panel, manufactured from the brand’s CircuLUM™ aluminium and cut into whatever pattern a designer creates in VEIL Studio, Nown’s own configuration software. The two work as a pair rather than separately: VEIL Studio is where the pattern gets designed, spectRAL is what comes out the other end, a laser-cut aluminium wall or ceiling panel built to a designer’s own specification rather than pulled from a catalogue.
