ATHENS, Greece — The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design has honored tires from Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., Federal Corp., Group Michelin and Nexen Tire Corp. with "Good Design" awards, emblematic of "cutting-edge" design.
The Chicago museum collaborates with the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies on selecting the winners.
The "Good Design" award recognizes the most innovative and cutting-edge industrial, product and graphic designs produced around the world. Products are judged on innovative design, new technologies, form, materials, construction, concept, function, utility, energy efficiency and sensitivity to the environment.
Cooper's winning designs are the Cooper Evolution H/T, an all-season highway tire for the U.S. market, and the Mastercraft Courser Sport 100, an ultra-high performance (UHP) tire for Asia. They were lauded for their design excellence, selected from among thousands of entires from more than 55 countries.
This marks the fifth straight year a Cooper product as won the award.
Chuck Yurkovich, the company's senior vice president of global research & development, called the award a "testament to Cooper's global design excellence."
Cooper's Evolution H/T was named a New Product category award winner at the recent Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Show in Las Vegas.
The all-season highway tire offers quality performance, superior handling and a comfortable ride, according to Cooper. It features the firm's proprietary 3D Micro-Gauge siping to help maintain wet traction and stability as well as a silica compound to improve grip and handling in both wet and dry conditions and to displace heat to keep the tire cooler.
Cooper said the Mastercraft Courser Sport 100 offers UHP capability for sport utility vehicles and is optimized for highway handling, superior stability and wet grip.
Federal's winning entry is the Himalaya Kattura winter tire, which features "ice-bite" design elements inspired by ice axes that dig into snow for optimal stopping power and claw-shaped grooves for traction on ice.
The tire's staggered sipes offer drainage and anti-hydroplaning characteristics to improve traction and cornering performance on both wet and snowy roads, and the product boasts a tread compound that offers reduced rolling resistance.
Michelin earned its Good Design award for the Pilot Sport 4S UHP, which the company said uses silica/functional elastomer tread compounds that yield "exceptional" steering precision and directional stability with maximum grip on wet or dry roads.
Nexen's winning design is the N'Fera AU7 all-season UHP premium passenger tire that features design elements that reduce the tire's noise footprint to make it more compatible with a growing range of electric vehicles.
The N'Fera AU7 uses a variety of design elements to reduce noise, including variable pitch tread elements and polyurethane foam inserts to absorb cavity noise.