Sun Microsystems Awarded 2006 IDEA by Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek

WebKnowHow
Tuesday, July 4, 2006; 04:11 AM

Sun Microsystems announced that its family of workstations and servers earned an Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA). Sun's Ultra Series Workstations, and the Sun Fire X4100 servers and the Sun Fire T2000 server with CoolThreads technology received a combined Bronze award in the Design Strategy category. Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the awards represent a celebration of the best and most innovative product designs of the year. Winners are featured in BusinessWeek's IDEA report in the July 10th issue, which hits newsstands today. This is the third IDEA win for Sun.

"Because Sun is focused on delivering system solutions to our customers, our primary objective was to design our products to work together seamlessly with emphasis on convenience to the user. For this reason, we're delighted to have the jury recognize our products for design strategy," said Phil Yurkonis of Sun's User Centered Design Group, responsible for directing Sun's hardware user experience design strategy.

A jury of 18 world-class designers and critics judged the roster of entries from 19 countries for the following measurement variables: design innovation, benefit to the user, benefit to the client/business, ecological responsibility and appropriate aesthetics and appeal. Out of nearly 1,500 entries, 27 won the Gold award, while 39 received the Silver and 42 won the Bronze.

Sun said its team team of industrial designers and human factors engineers developed the company's hardware user experience design strategy, focusing on reducing human error, making systems easier to interact with and requiring less training through consistent human machine interfaces. As part of Sun's focus on eco-responsibility, the industrial design team focuses on building products with extensibility, minimal components, materials appropriateness, and modularity.

Sun recently launched a "Try and Buy" program to give potential customers a way to test these award-winning systems for free, with no obligation. Customers can apply online for a "Try and Buy" Sun Fire server or Sun Ultra Workstation at: http://www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads/index.html.