I went along to the Design Museum‘s Designs of the Year last week – for the sixth time a panel of industry experts has got together to decide on the world’s best designs across seven categories – architecture, digital, fashion, furniture, graphics, product and transport. This year the jury comprised Ilse Crawford (who I interviewed last year) as chair; Johanna Agerman Ross, editor of Disegno; Amanda Levette, principal of architecture firm AL_A; Olga Polizzi Deputy Chairman and Director of Design of Rocco Forte Hotels; writer, cook, broadcaster and teacher Sarah Raven; Nicolas Roppe, founder of Antirom, Poke, Hulger and Plumen; and Griff Rhys Jones. Griff, Johanna and Nicolas were on hand for a photo call and very gamely posed within the Louis Vuitton Collection by Yayoi Kusama.
I don’t envy the panel’s task at all. They will select one overall winner from over 90 nominations as diverse as Heatherwick Studio‘s Olympic Cauldron and Simon Berry’s ColaLife, which uses Coca-Cola’s distribution channels to carry social products like oral rehydration salts and zinc supplements that save children’s lives. Not even really feeling qualified to pick a top ten, here a few things that caught my eye – and please forgive me for the many omissions…!
Inspired by Berlin’s currywurst vendors, Kiosk 2.0 by Unfold Studio brings design “out of the studio and onto the streets” in the form of a mobile 3D printing station.
I saw Engineering Temporality at [D3] Design Talents, IMM Cologne, and was moved by designer Tuomas Markunpoika‘s story – he was moved by his grandmother’s Alzheimers to create something that challenges our ideas of permanence. He covered furniture in tubular steel circles and then burnt the furniture, leaving just an echo of the original form behind. The chair wasn’t in Cologne, so it was good to see that, and fantastic to see work by such a new designer included in the nominations.
I’m a big Anthony Burrill fan (even more so having interviewed him and discovered what a lovely chap he is!), and I loved Made is Los Angeles: Work by Colby Poster Printing Co, that he curated by “raiding the Colby archive to create a vibrant set of prints, revisiting the very best of their past work.” The neon and grey colour scheme is incredibly current too.
I got a first peek at OK-RM‘s identity for the Strelka Institute when Keiran Long showed me the print-on-demand long-form essays (top right and below) he’s developed with them at the Stockholm Furniture Fair after a talk about communication in design – I immediately loved it, so it was very exciting to see the rest of the identity and to see it nominated for the Designs of the Year. The Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is a non-profit organisation aimed at generating discussion, ideas and projects in the creative and cultural industries.
Chairs are inevitably going to form a large part of any design award nomination list; in fact 10 of the 12 nominations within the furniture category included some sort of seating. With the aim of questioning our attitudes to waste, Re-imagined Chairs by Studiomama aka Nina Tolstrup and Jack Mama are made from discarded office chairs found on the streets of East London. The metal frames were stripped back and powder coated in bright modern colours, and then furnished with oversized seats and backs.
More printing innovation, this time Little Printer designed by Berg. You use your smartphone to set up subscriptions, and Little Printer gathers them together to print you a “timely and beautiful miniature newspaper.” Like Zite, but printed and tiny.
Future Primitives by Muller Van Severen is a “mixed use furniture unit” combining shelving, seating, tables and lighting, which employes a range of handcrafted (hand-stitched leather) and industrial (polyethylene shelving usually used in the catering industry) methods.
Konstantin Grcic‘s Medici Chair for Mattiazzi is made from single sheets of thermo-treated ash, walnut and douglas fir, joined at irregular angles with their joints on show, forming part of the resulting design. Plus, it’s yellow!
More graphic design; this time John Morgan‘s identity for the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. The stencil typeface was inspired by the exhibitions’s theme “common ground” and the existing Venetian signage – providing something that would “create a connection between the event, the city and its people”.
The Clapham One Library Building in the heart of London’s Clapham was designed by Studio Egret West.
Costing £6.5m, it holds more than 20,000 books and also provides a new space for local performance groups, 136 private apartments and 44 affordable homes.
The Air Access Seat by Priestmangoode makes it easier for people in wheelchairs to board planes. It is made up of two components, a detachable wheel chair for transition from the gate onto the plane, and a fixed frame aisle seat on board the plane, which the wheel chair component slides sideways into forming a normal airline seat.
The identity for the Barbican’s Bauhaus Art As Life, by A Practice for Everyday Life, drew from Bauhaus design principles of colour and structure – even the typeface is a contemporary reworking of the letterpress typeface used by the design school itself.
But perhaps my favourite, and I hesitate to say it, because there was so much amazing work there, and how do you choose between work answering such different briefs, but if pushed, perhaps my favourite nomination was Pi Global’s ColaLife and the Kit Yamoyo Anti-Diarrhoea Kit. Using Coca-Cola’s vast distribution network, ColaLife gets life-saving products to some of the world’s poorest people. Diarrhoea is the second highest cause of death is sub-saharan Africa, and simple measures like rehydration salts and vitamins can prevent at a significant proportion of these deaths. By creating cleaver products that fit into the spaces between Cola-Cola bottles, and packaging that doubles up as resealable measures and drinking cups, Pi Global has solved a massive problem at very little cost. If the brief for good design is making people’s lives better, this has got to be a contender for Design of the Year.
But go and judge for yourselves – the exhibition is on until 7th July – which nomination do you think is a worthy winner of Design of the Year? Which nominations have I missed that really stood out for you?
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- interview :: ilse crawford
- interview :: anthony burrill
- out and about :: [d3] design talents at imm cologne
- out and about :: stockholm furniture fair
