The experience of being part of the Glassberries Design Awards has become the start of my professional career as a designer and an extraordinary opportunity to share my potential and ideas. As a student, I had the chance to share my design with other students and professionals of the sector and to understand how the packaging process works from de conceptualization of an idea, to the fabrication process. In addition, I also had the opportunity to make a design internship in BA GLASS, where I learned how to give shape to my ideas not just with creativity but also with technical tools, that helped me to have a realistic vision of how design works and how to become a real designer.

These competitions, when done professionally, are excellent for students, because they get the students and the design schools to think on many levels. One is realism: they actually got to design something for industrial design production. The second part is that they have the opportunity to see something realized and the third part is the agenda of working with a material, especially something like glass: on one hand it has been so much done, in the other hand there’s infinite opportunities... You can go on forever.

I just want to say I’m honored and I’m grateful that I got to help judge this competition and to meet some of the students here. What the Glassberries Awards is doing is fantastic! Obviously, it’s just going to grow and grow. And it’s a beautiful subject matter because glass is ecological, it’s sustainable, it goes on forever in a way. You break it, you grind it, it goes in a circle, it’s very cyclical. It’s a great material, and it’s a great agenda. It’s great that BA is doing this. Thank you!

We could not believe it! When all the prizes were already given we thought: well, there are two options: they forgot about us or...okay, we are the winners! Even in this situation, we could not believe that we were about to win the Golden Glassberry. We were overwhelmed! Surrounded by important people and designers such as Karim Rashid, we felt the satisfaction of having our work recognized by them and by a company such as BA Glass. It brought us tons of emotions and, for a moment, we felt invincible.

That was one of the best days of our lives. But that’s not all! The time for the internship arrived and even though we were a little bit afraid in the beginning, it turned out to be one of our greatest experiences, learning every day new things about the glass industry and its market. Now that we are here, we feel that a 3 months internship is just too short.