Every year the Design Museum, in London, celebrates the best projects from the worlds of architecture, fashion, digital, product, furniture, transport and graphic design. Designs of the Year is an international competition that gives an overview of emerging trends and common themes from across different design disciplines through a selection of projects that, in the Museum’s words, range from ingeniously amusing to the admirably innovative.
This year’s selection includes international design stars such as Zaha Hadid, John Pawson, Stephen Jones, David Chipperfield, Miuccia Prada or Konstantin Grcic, alongside crowd-funded start-ups and student projects, for a total of 76 nominations. Shown in an exhibition that is due to open on the 26th of March and will culminate with an awards ceremony to be held later this year, the most iconic of the selected projects include a floating school in a Nigerian lagoon, a table that weighs just nine kilograms, a mobile phone made of detachable blocks, a calendar made of Lego, an arts centre at an old shipbuilding warehouse, a dome made by a robotic arm and live silkworms, and a range of tools for producing homemade cosmetics.
Covering a wide range of disciplines and an impressive number of undoubtedly exceptional projects, Designs of the Year should stand as representative of the current developments of ‘creative’ practices. In fact, this year the ubiquity of the smartphone is particularly apparent, as is the disruptive effect of crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter, with designers seeking to blur boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. Nevertheless, should it really be representative of design’s evolution through the years, in 2014 we feel a little disappointed in seeing the list of the nominees and can’t help but wonder whether Designs of the Year shouldn’t be confused with good designs of the year.
