2014 winners announced

Design Museum has announced the Designs of the Year 2014 category winners.

The Design Museum announces the seven category winners for the annual Designs of the Year Awards. Designs of the Year celebrates a year’s worth of cutting-edge innovation and original talent; showcasing the very best in global Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic, Product and Transport design. The seven category winners are:

Architecture: Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku Azerbaijan - Designed by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher. Elaborate undulations, folds and inflections modify this plaza surface into an architectural landscape that performs a multitude of functions.

Digital: Peek (Portable Eye Examination Kit) - Designed by Dr Andrew Bastawrous, Stewart Jordan, Dr Mario Giardini, Dr Iain Livingstone. A smartphone-based system for comprehensive eye examinations, PEEK is easy to use, affordable and portable, meaning that it can bring eye care to even the remotest of settings.

Fashion: Prada S/S14 - Designed by Miuccia Prada. Pop-art prints meet sporty details and structured shapes in this boldly coloured, powerful collection. Vogue said of the show ‘By next summer we'll wonder what we ever wore before.’

Furniture: Pro chair family - Designed by Konstantin Grcic. Featuring state-of-the-art ergonomics and pioneering design, the construction of the chair not only allows movement in all directions, but actively stimulates it thereby promoting healthier sitting. 

Graphics: Drone Shadows - Designed by James Bridle / booktwo.org. A series of installations consisting of a 1:1 outline of a military unmanned aerial vehicle, or Drone. They have appeared in the UK, Turkey, the USA, Brazil and elsewhere.

Product: The Seaboard Grand - Designed by Roland Lamb and Hong-Yeul Eom. The Seaboard is a reinvention of the piano keyboard, reimagining the keys as soft waves that enable continuous and discrete real-time, tactile control of sound through three-dimensional hand gestures. The design combines contemporary minimalism and traditional handcrafted quality.

Transport: XL1 CAR – Designed by Volkswagen. The world’s the most efficient liquid-fuelled production car; it requires only 8.4 PS to sustain a constant 100kph on a level surface in still air, a speed the car can reach from rest in 12.7 seconds.

From the daringly innovative to the reassuringly good, Designs of the Year 2014 is a condensed and vivid selection of the last twelve months in design.  This spectrum of expert-chosen design is an insight into what design can do for us both as individuals and as a society, says Gemma Curtin, curator of Designs of the Year.