TEMPO.CO, Bandung - Telkom University Interior Design study program student, Alifiah Azzahrah, from Indonesia, won the Designer of the Year award in the Interior Design category. She received this title from the Asia Young Designer Awards (AYDA) International Awards 2023/2024 at Grand Chola, Chennai, India.

As the winner, Alifiah is entitled to receive a scholarship worth US$10,000 to take part in a three-week program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. "The design I am offering entitled Payabo House is a place where collectors in Makasar City can do plastic processing work," she said in a written statement, Thursday, July 18, 2024.

Previously, Alifiah won the AYDA Gold Award at the national level in 2023. She brought the same design work entitled Payabo House at the Asian level which took place July 3 to 5, 2024. From the description of the design work, the Payabo House is dedicated to scavengers in the Sumba Opu Fort area, Makasar, South Sulawesi. The area is where most of the scavengers live.

The aim of the design, according to Alifiah, is to create an indoor workplace for scavengers to improve the quality of life and the profession of collecting plastic. The way to do this is by improving the process, namely that scavengers can turn plastic waste into shredded plastic, which costs twice the price of ordinary plastic waste.

In her design, she used more than 600 plastic bottles to make the Payabo House. Apart from functioning as a partition, blackboard or chair, the bottle is also used as the identity of a place. “Plastic can also help reduce the costs of building these places in the future,” she said.

The hope is that Rumah Payabo can make the lives of scavengers better with a clean house and reduce their work outdoors. According to Alififah, the design development can be done elsewhere. "This project can also prove that design is not only used by those who can afford it, but design is also used by those who need it," she said.

AYDA International Awards 2023/2024 is an international scale competition which is divided into two categories, namely design and architecture. After going through a national judging process, the contestants compete with finalists from 20 countries in the Asian region.

As the winner, Alifiah received a Design Discovery Program scholarship prize worth US$10,000 at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for three weeks in Boston, United States. Meanwhile, the winner in the architecture category was Lim Jeng Ying from Universiti Malaysia.

ANWAR SISWADI (CONTRIBUTOR)

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