Designs of the Year Awards 2015

From advertisements that attack organic waste to self-driving cars, the 2015 Designs of the Year Awards cover the full scope of contemporary design. Organized annually by the London-based Design Museum, the awards program recognized six top designs that were selected by a jury of five, which included the likes of architect Farshid Moussavi and artist Anish Kapoor. It was clear that some projects won the jury over thanks to their sheer virtuosity. According to juror, writer, and stylist Hilary Alexander, Fashion category–winner Thomas Tait's futuristic apparel stands out for its “outstanding technical precision in terms of the paneling and innovative seaming.” Others were selected for their commitment to harness design as a social or environmental benefit. In this vein there is the Digital category–winner The Ocean Cleanup, which aims to heal seaborne pollution.

The six winners of each category—Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Graphics, Products, Transport—along with dozens of other nominees are on view at the Design Museum until March 26, 2016. In case you can’t make it, here’s a brief overview of the winners.

Architecture
UC Innovation Center–Anacleto Angelini
Designed by Elemental

Located in Santiago, Chile, this 14-story building is where businesses and a university collaborate and form partnerships. Its designer, Elemental, is a non-for-profit practice that tackles infrastructure, housing, public space, transportation, and other projects that can do broad social good. This design features deep recesses that allow natural airflow and create shared spaces.  

DIGITAL

The Ocean Cleanup

Designed by Boyan Slat, Jan de Sonneville PhD and Erwin Zwart

‘Digital’ is a broad category that includes apps, games, interfaces, and websites. This year’s winner educates, fundraises, and coordinates efforts to clean the world’s oceans. In the words of juror Anish Kapoor, the website’s designers “[take] a different view of design – that it can gather in forces via the internet and use a fairly straightforward process to deal with the problem itself.”

FASHION

Thomas Tait Autumn Winter 13/14

Designed by Thomas Tait

Hettie Judah, fashion writer and editor who first nominated Tait for the award, best sums his mastery: “He creates pieces in which the decorative pattern and the structural pattern of the garment are as one: what appears to be a simple striped trouser is constructed like a three dimensional jigsaw….to create crisp geometry in the pattern and a fitted garment without sideseams.” Tait won the inaugural LVMH young designer prize in 2014.

GRAPHICS

Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables

Designed by Marcel for Intermarché

Can you judge a vegetable by its cover? Many do, rejecting them when they are perfectly viable, resulting in massive amounts of wasted resources. That prompted a French supermarket chain to launch an ad campaign to sway public opinion. Designed by Paris and New York-based Marcel, their work uses humor and stark realism to make their point.

PRODUCT

Human Organs-On-Chips

Designed by Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering have created an alternative to the expensive, fraught, and sometimes ineffective practice of animal-based drug testing. The team developed a microchip that mimics a functioning human lung using small amounts of human blood, lung cells, and a special membrane. The small chip isn’t complex or expensive – it’s a simple mechanism that could be widely used. The team aims to replicate this approach to recreate kidneys and other organs for testing purposes.  

TRANSPORT

Google Self-Driving-Car

Designed by YooJung Ahn, Jared Gross and Philipp Haban

These purpose-built self-driving prototypes were first tested about one year ago, and in the words of juror Richard Woolley, its combination of technologies are a “precursor to a real revolution in personal transport.” With the likes of Elon Musk claiming the problem of self-driving cars is very solvable – if not solved already – the question is simply who will foster and dominate the market first?