Design Week Award winners 2016 – the special categories

Hall of Fame

The Hall of Fame is a lifetime achievement award recognising continued services to the design industry over a career.

Deyan Sudjic OBE

The current director of the Design Museum and one of the people who has helped spearhead the museum’s move from it’s current Shad Thames location in June and relocate to the former Commonwealth Institute in November.

Sudjic is also a writer and broadcaster who has worked as design and architecture critic for The Observer, as the Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University and has been a visiting professor of The Royal College of Art.

In 1983 he co-founded the architecture magazine Blueprint, where he was also editor and editorial director.

More recently he was director of Glasgow’s UK City of Architecture and Design program in 1999 and the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. He was a juror for the London Aquatics Centre designed and built for the 2012 Olympics by architect Zaha Hadid, the same year he was awarded an honorary degree from the University for the Creative Arts.

He has written many books on design and architecture, the latest of which are B is for Bahaus (2014) and Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things (2015).

Dids Macdonald OBE

Starting out as a designer Dids Macdonald ran her own interior design company Holbein before becoming a designer-maker.

She founded ACID (Anti Copying in Design) in 1996 as she was consistently finding her products were being copied.

What started as a round table action group, grew to become a not for profit organisation representing thousands of designers in the creative industries.

She lectures widely on IP issues concentrating on lone, micro and SME’s both nationally and internationally.

In the wake of the Hargreaves Review on IP in 2010 ACID lobbied for SME’s, parity of design right with copyright and trade marks, higher exemplary damages and the need for a fast track small claims court for IP infringements.

Since then Government has recommended various IP and design reforms many of which ACID has campaigned for.

In June 2015 Dids was included in Her Majesty’s Birthday Honours as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Age of Design Award 

MET Studio 

Our Age of Design Award in association with IBM was the search for the best Best of Show and every winner since the Design Week Awards was set up in 1990 has been in the offing.

Design Week readers voted for their favourite and the winner was a project from 2000 – Wired World Exhibition, by MET Studio.

The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television’s in-house team worked with Met Studio on the project, which was designed to demystify the internet, virtual reality and special effects.

The project beat the likes of Apple’s original iPhone and iPad, the BBC identity, the British Airways First class seat and the Norton F1 motorcycle.

Rising Star

The aim of this Award is to discover the design industry stars of the future. It is open to those who have been in the design industry for up to three years, regardless of age. Entrants can be in a consultancy, in-house or freelance, but must working as a professional designer. Entrants can can be working in any design discipline.

Jonathan Gomez 

Gomez is an industrial and UX designer particularly interested in the study of human behaviours and how new technologies inform product innovation.

He graduated in product design from Central St Martins College of Art and Design in June 2015, during which time he has interned and freelanced for the likes of Map, Barber and Osgerby and Tangerine.

Since then he co-founded Project Pen and is working to design, produce and commercialise a pen. Meanwhile he is working as project lead at Emotech where he is design lead and responsible for Industrial, user experience, user interface, web and interaction design operations.

Gomez says: “Before leaving university, top companies like Microsoft and Native Design offered me junior positions. I was about to join Microsoft when Emotech’s founder offered me the chance to join his young start-up and help him create a new type of device.

“Although it felt risky at the time, the opportunity to design Olly – the first personal robot of its kind – was ridiculously exciting and led me to decline other offers.”