The list of categories keeps getting longer and messier, but the award still shows you what kinds of products are shaping daily life, now and in the years ahead.

Set up in 1953 by the Industrial Design Forum in Hannover, Germany, the annual iF Design Award ranks among the leading prizes in industrial and product design worldwide.

The idea behind it goes back to postwar Germany, where a group of businessmen, manufacturers and designers — led by Philip Rosenthal of the Rosenthal ceramics family — set out to build a new brand image for the country by following Bauhaus design and a notion of "good form": industrial products that combined a fine shape with sound moral qualities.

Today, as iF's name and its commercial scale have grown, its categories have gone from the original three — product design, communication design and packaging design — to seven, adding interior design, architecture, service design and concept design.

In 2017 the award drew 5,575 entries from 59 countries. Seventy-five designs took gold in the end, among them Apple's latest MacBook Pro, the iPhone 7 Plus and the new BMW 5 Series. Here are some of the other entries we found interesting on the winners' list.

The Flip Flap Chair

The Flip Flap chair came out of a three-year collaboration between ITO Design, a Swiss industrial design studio founded in 1987, and ITOKI, the long-established Japanese office furniture brand. It is an office chair you can sit on or lie on comfortably.

The backrest is the chair's defining feature. Drawing on traditional origami, the faceted, polyhedral backrest folds down to different angles to suit the four states an office worker passes through in a working day.

Early morning is when people are at their sharpest. The backrest then sits at nearly 90 degrees to the seat, holding up an upright back and lower back. At lunch it folds back 135 degrees and the chair turns into a recliner you can lie flat on. In the afternoon, as employees relax and talk with the colleagues around them, the backrest can tilt back a little. And in the most tiring stretch of the day, just before quitting time, the designers argue, a comfortable posture helps people concentrate long enough to finish the last of their work.

The chair also shapes its lumbar section to support the pelvis and lower back and hold them in place while you sit, to limit the harm of sitting for hours. The armrests move up and down as well, easing the wrist fatigue that comes from long spells of typing or using a mouse.

Before this iF gold, the design had already won the Good Design Award given each year by the Chicago Athenaeum, in 2016, and the Good Design Award from the Japan Institute of Design Promotion.

Future Lab Program™: Sony's Interactive Projector T

Sony's Future Lab Program™ is a branch of the research and development arm of Sony in Japan. It uses the company's newest technology to build prototype products, and invites the public to use them and take part in developing them, which brings in more research data.

The lab's first prototype project was a wearable headphone, shown in March 2016 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. What won an iF gold this year is its second project — the interactive projector T.

The projector is a plain black rectangular box, but Sony's own sensing technology lets it track how objects move inside the projected area. Users can tap with one finger or several to call up an object's size and position, turning a tabletop into a surface you can work on together.

The Future Lab first released the projector's concept and part of the thinking behind the technology in 2016, then handed the project to partner developers to build out together — a workable cooling system, the outer contours, the stand, cable management and the rest.

Only in early 2017 did a prototype of the T go public. Call it a piece of "crowdsourced creativity" with Sony's technology behind it.

The Wine Bottle That "Ages"

This is one of five winners in packaging design this year, from Kolle Rebbe, a creative business agency in Hamburg, Germany. Founded in 1994, it works across graphic design, packaging design and product design through to brand strategy and brand marketing, and it also runs and backs a number of small startups as a company in its own right.

The team seems to do a bit of everything, yet in the two decades and more since it started, Kolle Rebbe has taken 44 iF gold awards — so many that you cannot find a single item on its website celebrating a win. (Perhaps no one has got around to updating it.)

Back to the point: this year Kolle Rebbe designed the bottle for the limited-edition 2012 Cuvée XR from the German wine estate Knipser.

To show what age and time do for a wine, the designers put this batch — three years in maturation — into a copper bottle made for it. The longer it sits, the smoother the wine gets, and the more a fine green patina spreads across the copper. Once the wine is gone, the patterned bottle can serve as an ornament at home.

The #BeFearless Virtual Reality Software

BeFearless, the virtual reality software that won gold in communication design this year, is meant to help people get over the things or the places they fear. Samsung planned and produced it with Cheil, the advertising agency under the Tongyi Group; in practice it is a marketing campaign for Samsung's Gear VR headset.

Psychologists helped develop #BeFearless, and the project has produced two scenarios so far.

The first simulates various high places around a city, to help people afraid of heights get past the fear; the second simulates a packed lecture hall or a business meeting, to help people who struggle to speak in public get past the block. Samsung's instructions say users pair a smartphone, a smartwatch and wireless earphones to track their heart rate and record their own voice, so they can see more clearly how they behave in a situation that frightens them.

The software makes its case for scientific rigor with a set of figures: a clinical study at Gangnam Severance Hospital, Yonsei University, in South Korea found that of 82 people who used #BeFearless, 87.8% said they had benefited; users who struggle to speak in public said their anxiety scores fell 18.7%, and people afraid of heights reported a drop of 23.6%.

The VR program is now making its way into hospitals, helping people ease their fears under low-risk conditions. The iF jury's verdict: "Software that can hand people back their freedom and change their lives."

The Online Music Short Film Make Yourself Unstoppable

Another gold winner in communication design, Make Yourself Unstoppable is an online music marketing video the Swiss menswear brand Strellson made to mark the 70th birthday of Freddie Mercury, Queen's famous frontman, built around a classic song produced by the star producer MNEK.

The film follows a man in a Strellson suit on a strange journey through the city. His thin mustache is another nod to Freddie Mercury.

The film was also Strellson's first try at purely digital marketing. Plan.net, a studio inside Serviceplan, one of Europe's largest digital marketing companies, planned and produced it. The Berlin directing duo Wolf & Lamm, who specialize in videos for artists and fashion brands, handled the shoot.

Make Yourself Unstoppable went online on Freddie Mercury's 70th birthday, September 5, 2016. It drew 13 million clicks on social media and 98 million website impressions around the world.

The Babaokeng Hutong Renovation in Beijing (BBK35)

Laboratory for Diverse Status, a design studio with its office in Beijing, began as Cloud Studio, founded in London by the architect Liu Yiqing — a graduate of Tsinghua University's architecture department who studied art and design at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Under the new name, Liu Yiqing and his team have worked on the Libya Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, an office building for the Communication University of China (formerly the Beijing Broadcasting Institute) in Beijing's Chaoyang district, and the Kaohsiung Music Center.

The courtyard renovation in Babaokeng Hutong that won gold in interior design was finished in July 2016. Liu Yiqing's team turned this classic Beijing siheyuan into an Airbnb with nine guest rooms and a large shared lounge, now run by three young men: Brad, Benson and Jason.

The designers say the interior and the spatial plan draw on the five elements and the way of yin and yang, an attempt to fold traditional Chinese culture into a contemporary way of living. Behind the high roof beams and the vermilion gate sit rough cement walls, lantern-shaped pendant lamps, Chinese furniture, industrial iron railings and leather sofas, arranged among one another.

BBK35, which also goes by the Chinese name Dongtian, charges $80 to $90 a room per night. In the six months and more since it opened, it has collected mostly warm reviews on Airbnb. "Well designed," "an interesting hutong building" and "well run" are the phrases that come up most often.

The Tate Guide App: Dayfinding

The only service design product to win at this year's iF Design Award is a "tour guide" app that keeps visitors to London's Tate from getting lost, from getting worn out by the art, and from not knowing what they are looking at.

Fabrique, the Dutch creative studio behind the official website of London's Design Museum, designed it. The app, called Dayfinding, aims to give visitors a personal route through a vast gallery that holds more than 200 exhibitions and events.

Open the app and it asks a question first: "What would you like to do now?" It offers three answers — look at the art, go to an event, or take a break. People can move between the three as their mood shifts, and build their own visit.

Under the art guide option, Dayfinding provides an interactive map of the gallery, marking what each room holds and the walking routes between them. Step into a room and the app shows a detailed note on every work on display — usually audio or text from the artist or the curator.

The app is part of Bloomberg Connects, a creative program backed by Bloomberg. Its aim is to use the newest technology to improve the experience of visiting a museum, and most of its money comes from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg's charitable arm.

Bloomberg Connects started its first audio guide project in 1999 and added mobile app technology in 2013. So far 15 arts institutions have had the program's support, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center and Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.

One last note: the ocean-wave breakwater system by the Taiwanese designer Li Shenghong, which QDaily has written about before, also took an iF gold this year, in concept design.

The cover image and every image without a credit come from: iF World Design Guide.