Dezeen's Design You Can Feel collaboration with ASUS has been named commercial partnership of the year for its "exceptional creativity" at the Professional Publishers Association's annual awards gala.
The project, which culminated in an interactive exhibition at Milan design week in 2025, won the Commercial Partnership of the Year award for business media at a ceremony in London last month.
"The winning partnership impressed judges with its exceptional creativity and audience insight, delivering an innovative campaign that exceeded targets against a very complex brief," the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) judges said.
Studio INI created a kinetic sculpture for the Design you Can Feel exhibition
Taking place in a beautiful Art Nouveau gallery in Milan, the Design You Can Feel exhibition explored the themes of materiality, craftsmanship and artificial intelligence.
It was conceived, developed and delivered by Dezeen's in-house creative agency, Dezeen Studio, in partnership with the technology brand ASUS. We teamed up with event production agency My Beautiful City on the exhibition design, while Alpha Kilo did the PR.
We commissioned Studio INI to create a spectacular kinetic installation at the heart of the exhibition, which drew over 12,000 visitors to the event and generated millions of interactions across social media as well as extensive international press coverage.
Reaching an audience of over a billion and generating $13 million of earned media value for ASUS, the project successfully positioned the brand as a design-led innovator during the biggest moment in the design calendar.
Design You Can Feel praised for its "clever execution"
The collaboration was also recognised by two other industry awards programmes in recent weeks.
It received a bronze award for best overseas event at the Conference and Events Awards and was highly commended at the Digital Publishing Awards run by the Association of Online Publishers (AOP).
"Highly collaborative, the earned media result was impressive," AOP judges said of the project.
"To be able to accomplish what they did around a laptop that normally wouldn't allow for such creativity was a very clever execution," they added.
The Milan project is the second time Dezeen has worked with ASUS, building on a successful partnership with the technology brand at London Design Festival in 2024.
"The Design You Can Feel project in Milan was a powerful demonstration of how storytelling can bring design and technology together in a way that feels genuinely human," said Coraline Lin, global marketing director at ASUS
"Working with Dezeen allowed us to move beyond product features and tell a richer story about artificial intelligence, materiality, movement and emotion. It set a new benchmark for how meaningful brand stories can be told within a cultural context."
Latest award win for Dezeen
This is the second time that Dezeen has won a PPA Award for its commercial partnerships in recent years, winning the same category for our partnership with Bentley in 2024.
Last year, Dezeen Awards also received two accolades at the Conference and Events Awards 2025, including being named event of the year.
We have also received many accolades for our journalism. Last year, our design and environment editor Jennifer Hahn was named Young Arts Journalist of the Year at the Chartered Institute of Journalists' inaugural Young Journalist Awards, while our features editor Nat Barker was named Architectural Journalist of the Year at the International Building Press Awards.
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