The category winners for the 2015 Designs of the Year awards have been announced. One of the winners from the architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport categories will be picked as overall winner.
The overall winner of last year's competition was the Heydar Aliyev Center designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. This year's nominations were announced back in February, and the category winners were selected by a jury chaired by artist Anish Kapoor.
"This year’s judges were united in their responsibility to award projects that emphasize design's impact on our lives now and in the future," says Designs of the Year exhibition curator Gemma Curtin. "Solving diverse problems with innovation, intelligence and wit, each of these six designs is a worthy winner."
The winners are as follows:
Architecture
The UC Innovation Center in Santiago, Chile, is an eco-friendly university building designed by Elemental. It is aimed at providing a good environment for knowledge-creation and is reportedly able to reduce energy costs by two-thirds, with a thermal mass on the perimeter and open-air squares throughout.
Digital
The Ocean Cleanup project, designed by Boyan Slat, Jan de Sonneville PhD and Erwin Zwart, is aimed at removing plastic waste from our oceans. Its designers call it "the largest cleanup in history" and plan to crowdfund its delivery.
Product
Advancing personalized medicine is the aim of the Organs-on-Chips project, accelerating drug discovery and decreasing development costs. Designed by scientists at Harvard University's Wyss Institute, it comprises microdevices that are lined with living human cells and that mimic the complex tissue structures, functions and mechanical motions of whole organs.
Transport
Designed by YooJung Ahn, Jared Gross and Philipp Haban, Google's self-driving car continues to be developed and is due to hit the streets of California for testing later this year.
Fashion
A collection by Central St Martins graduate Thomas Tait is said to have been created in a technically and aesthetically skillful way, with a visionary and confident combination of color, cut and materials.
Graphics
Marcel designed an advertising campaign for French supermarket Intermarché to encourage the purchase of misshapen fruits. The campaign sought to celebrate the beauty of the products, which are sold for a 30 percent reduction in cost.
The overall winner of the 2015 Designs of the Year competition will be selected by the jury and announced in June. All 70 nominated designs are currently on display until March 31 2016 at London's Design Museum.
Source: Design Museum