Design Museum opens Brit Insurance prize show

The Design Museum’s second Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition opens to the public today at its Shad Thames home in London.

A total of 94 nominations, put forward by design luminaries including Wayne Hemingway, Martino Gamper and Emily Campbell, span categories including architecture, fashion, graphics, product, furniture and interactive.

Within graphics, nominations range from Shepherd Fairey’s iconic graphics for Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign to The Guardian’s visualisation of the collapse of the credit markets.

Within furniture, showstoppers at last year’s Milan furniture fair – including Mallett’s Tord Boontje leaf wardrobe, Shay Alkalay’s stacking drawers, and Terence Woodgate and John Barnard’s Surface Table, both for Established & Sons – are no surprise to the shortlist.

Nominations in the product category this year possibly present the most diverse selection of conceptual design, from Revital Cohen’s Life Support, which raises a debate about technologically mediated healthcare, to more politically motivated designs such as Tony Mullin’s Green Felt Protest Suit, put forward by Onkar Kular.

The protest suit is designed to circumvent the ban on protests around Parliament Square, by enabling messages to be conveyed to the public when filmed using ‘Hollywood Green Screen’.

Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition runs from 12 February to 14 June at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1.

Category winners will be announced on 23 February, while the overall winner will be revealed on 18 March at an awards ceremony at the museum.

For further information, see www.designmuseum.org.