The theme of the first collaboration competition was set back in 2020: Can you deliver?

More than half of the world’s population live in urban areas. In Europe, the proportion is over eighty per cent. Supplying all these people with the stuff they need is a huge undertaking. In the Paris region alone, some 4.3 million deliveries are made every week. It’s everything from fish fingers to face packs, from pharmaceuticals to photocopiers, from books to boots to beef to bags to batting bats. We could go on.

In the 2022 Toyota Logistic Design Competition we’re asking you to get your head around the enormous issues involved in urban micrologistics. And suggesting ways of dealing with the rising problems. As well as improving expediency.

We are happy to present the winners of this year’s Toyota Logistic Design Competition. The response was huge: over 1500 registrations and 203 final submissions. Toyota Logistic Design Competition 2022, Category Gold Award Winner is Jacob Abraham from University of Houston, USA, with "Oro". The award ceremony and exhibition was held during Logiconomi in Belgium, a unique logistic event.

Our business is helping people. We help them pick up things, move them, then put them down. Often somewhere else. People have been doing this since the very beginning. It’s a constant. And although our products keep changing and evolving, we remind ourselves that our work isn’t primarily about the products. Design is about putting the human being at the centre. It’s about the human dimension.

So, regardless of where our users come from, what language they speak, their gender, they should feel equally welcome and at ease using our products. From the middle of nowhere we now embrace the world.

I was asked to set up Toyota Material Handling Europe’s Design Center in 2006, and worked on my own for the first five years, in the sleepy Swedish small town of Mjölby. Swedish simplicity turned out to work hand in glove with the J-factor.

With a huge range of products to design I realised we just had to grow – and also work differently. The answer was introducing a design competition. The Toyota Logistic Design Competition (TLDC) got off the ground in 2014, and has given us the opportunity to enter into dialogue with design students around the world.

Out of the winners from the three competitions so far, we’ve been able to recruit four young designers. These young talents tend to stay with the studio for a few years, and then we give them a hand in extending their careers within the Toyota Group. Baggage handling at airports needs a shot in the arm.

So, our latest design challenge was to ask design students from all over the world to revolutionise airport baggage handling. Out of a staggering 2,397 registrations worldwide on how to make baggage handling fly, we’re now down to ten finalists.

Two of the contributors are Hungarian. Then there’s one from Thailand, and one from Turkey, respectively. And finally, as many as six finalists come from the US. Some of their impressive work will be on display at the next Milan Design Week, to coincide with our first appearance there.