AwardsPloom
Core77 Design Awards, notable professional 2011

Tegu
Dwell on Design Best in Show 2011
Toy of the Year (TOTY) Awards, Specialty Toy 2014
Talks
2014
Power of Design: "Designer's Toolbox"
Appalachian State University

2012
Designing Change: “A look at how design thinking is shaping new business futures.”
San Francisco, CA

2009
DTS09. Design Thinking Symposium: “I’m Alex, this is Design Thinking”
Singapore
Publications
Contributor: Make Space: How to set the Stage for Creative Collaboration
Doorley, S., & Witthoft, S. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons

Patents
2015 “Single Serve Beverage Production Machine”
2016 “CLIP”
2016 “Seating Device Having Tilt Mechanism”

alexko.co

Alex Ko makes things.
Sometimes it’s food.
Sometimes it’s products.
Product DesignGraphic DesignFood

2009

Client
Tegu Toys

Tegu started as a mission, more specifically, a mission for brothers Chris and Will Haughey to help people of Honduras. They had identified that wood exports, specifically mahagony, was an asset to leverage. Project
Next-Generation Wooden Toy

The original brief was simple: create the next-generation wooden toy. Role
Product Designer

A project brief as blue-sky as this one can be dis-orienting. It was very useful to start with the user: kids who play with constuctivist toys. We established connections with a number of Bay-Area schools and through a series of play-stidies, noticed an interesting observation: kids were having as much fun destroying their creations as they were making them. This was subtle, but this emotion combined with the lasting attraction the magnetic prototype amongst all the concepts, eventually led to Tegu magnetic wooden blocks.

Magic Block Prototype
Awards:
Dwell on Design Best in Show 2011
Toy of the Year (TOTY) Awards, Specialty Toy 2014
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