EDGC's family tree service YouWho wins iF Design Award

YouWho's service kit won this year's iF Design Award. Courtesy of EDGC

By Ko Dong-hwan

The family tree discovery service YouWho won this year's iF Design Award, according to its parent company Korean genetic analysis company Eone Diagnomics Genome Center (EDGC) on April 20.

The award, hosted by Germany's International Forum, is one of the world's three most prestigious design awards, along with Germany's Red Dot Design Award and America's International Design Excellence Awards, EDGC said. YouWho won a Red Dot award in 2020.

BForBrand, which designed the packaging for YouWho's service kit and a report template where clients' ancestry is shown, had the idea that humanity's past, present and future are all interconnected via a "genetic theme." The philosophy was shared by EDGC that co-designed the product.

"The product design of YouWho tells a story that a person interested in re-discovering their own self learns about their genetic ancestry as well as their innate characteristics in terms of predisposition and health using an easy-to-use YouWho kit, and happily connects to others," Kim Seon-gyun, YouWho's business team leader, told The Korea Times.

By analyzing genetic data in a drop of saliva, YouWho enables users to discover their ethic map ― a breakdown of ethnic background ― and suggests how their ancestors had possibly moved about across the world to settle. It also reveals the genetic data of one's parents.

Such services are based on some 730,000 entries of core genetic big data that EDGC acquired after having studied genome sequencing of 3 billion pairs of DNA.

It is the only family tree service approved by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Korea.

YouWho is EDGC's key business in competing against its rivals like America's 23andMe and Ancestry under the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the United States, about 26 million people have already used the service. Citing MIT Technology Review, EDGC said the service's users in the U.S. will reach 100 million within two years.

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