A streamlined household toilet that defies gravity flushed out rivals to win the 2014 Good Design of the Year on Wednesday night.
The toilet is part of a new range of modern bathroom furniture by Caroma that was awarded the top prize for design at the awards, included in this year's Vivid festival.
Standout winners included the redesign of Prince Alfred Park and pool, a peg that doubles as a hook, a baby's teat that mirrors mother nature by being slightly off-centre and a smartphone app and matching device that is said to measure blood alcohol as accurately as a police breath test.
The new suite of bathroom products, including toilets, sinks and showers, was designed by Marc Newson to reduce each item to a minimum of elements.
To create the wall-mounted toilet's appearance of floating off the wall, the designers faced ''design engineering challenges,'' said the judges.
According to Dr Steve Cummings, research and development manager for Caroma, Newson's design demands made it initially very difficult to flush the toilet.
"We were fighting gravity, so we had a significant technical issue to overcome," he said.
The flush channel was angled up, rather than horizontal, requiring water to travel up into the flushing channels, which had never been done before, Caroma believes.
Because the design was important to Mr Newson, the company invested eight months of time and research to develop the suite. It required the redesign of the toilet's flushing mechanism and the dropping of the flush pipe to send water uphill first.
The toilet was engineered to withstand an 800 kilogram person sitting on it, twice the Australian requirement, and to flush away the Australian standard of 160 grams of solids.
"These products function smoothly and are beautifully resolved - certainly a great example of 'form following function','' said the judges.
An award winner for consumer electronics was a pocket breathalyser, which uses the technology used by police in random breath testing. Judges said it was clever, accurate and functional.
Unlike inexpensive handheld devices, the $249 BACtrack mobile breathalyser sends a reading wirelessly to a user's mobile phone, where an app converts the data and displays the reading with warnings.
A 63-kilogram woman, for example, who downed three apple martinis in a one-hour drinking session would likely read 0.06%, over the 0.05 limit.
The app also predicts the time it would take to sober up, about four hours in this case.
A spokeswoman for AlcoLimit, which distributes the BACtrack Smartphone Breathalyser, said the app was very popular around Father's Day with tech savvy dads.
