An unassuming white box that unlocks solar power for apartment dwellers has taken out the top honour at this year’s Australian Good Design awards.
Melbourne-based Allume Energy won the 2026 Australian Good Design award of the year for its SolShare system. The product, which works like a “traffic controller for solar” enables power produced by a shared rooftop system to be split among several apartments without multiple installations, individual inverters and messy wiring. It also received the award for sustainability.
Dr Brandon Gien, chair of Good Design Australia, said SolShare was not only “an amazing piece of technology” but also a beautifully designed solution to a complex problem.
“Millions of people live in apartments, and many have had limited access to the benefits of rooftop solar. SolShare is a clever Australian design innovation that addresses that problem in a practical way, and it is already delivering benefits at significant scale.”
Gien said the awards recognise design that is more than skin deep. Products need to be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing (a nice looking kettle is no good if it doesn’t boil water), with innovation and societal impact among the key criteria.
First established in 1958, the event has a storied history as one of the world’s oldest design awards. Past top gongs have included the Cochlear hearing implant (2000), Marc Newson’s economy class seats for the Qantas A380 (2009), the Flow Hive beehive design (2016) and James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger, a submersible designed and built by the Hollywood director and Ron Allum in collaboration with local designers Design+Industry (2012).
This year, SolShare received the highest accolade among more than 1,000 entries from Australia and overseas. The awards, presented at a black tie ceremony at ICC Sydney on Friday night, recognised 13 disciplines in fields ranging from products and communication to digital and policy design, spanning more than 30 categories.
Icons, a collection of animal-inspired climbable landmarks, was recognised for its product design. The structures – a cross between public art and recreation – designed by Industrial by Nature were a joint winner of the best in discipline for product design, alongside Allume. Some were already in use, like the custom-designed Rakali installed at Wilson Park playground in Perth.
A ceremonial gathering space at Melbourne’s City Square received the award for best in discipline for the built environment. The space, designed by Greenshoot Consulting in collaboration with Wurundjeri elders, was created to welcome visitors to Country, sustain cultural knowledge and practices, make Woi-wurrung language visible and acknowledge First Peoples as the traditional custodians of the land.
Sydney Children’s hospital’s placemaking and wayfinding project won best in discipline for communication design. Visiting a hospital and navigating the labyrinthine corridors could be a traumatic experience, for children as well as their parents and carers. Gien said the design by Frost*collective understood that “at a very deep and empathetic level”.
Instead of neon lights and pale blue walls, the design reimagined what a hospital could be, with signs and artwork incorporating native animals and plants, grouped into three local environments: wetlands, sand dunes and sea cliffs.
Bush Cradle by Xavier Earls, a modular habitat system for native animals, was recognised as the best in discipline for next gen designers (under 30s).
Earls said he wanted to create a “universal system” that could meet the needs of different species. Bush Cradle’s four interchangeable pieces are able to be assembled into nest boxes or shelters. “One of the major threats to native animals in Australia is the loss of habitat, and this habitat like tree hollows, fallen logs, can’t be naturally replenished in a rate that is functional,” he said.
“What I love about it is that it’s designing for a non-human, it’s designing for nature” Gien said.
Many of the winners showcased designs supporting reuse, repair and alternatives to single-use plastics. Finnish company FabPatch topped the fashion and textiles discipline for its rub-on fabric repair system, while No Wrap, an Australian designed re-usable system for securing pallets, and Holy Carp, a plastic-free, compostable alternative to soy-sauce fish by Australian studio Heliograf, both won gold awards in different categories.
The awards shone a light on good design that could “bring joy to our lives, but not at the expense of the environment”, Gien said.
“Design is everywhere around us,” he said. “From the products that we use, the spaces that we work in, the homes that we live in, the services that we use, and the digital apps that consume us.”
