Brit Insurance Designs of the Year: A Hundred Definitions of Design
February 15, 2008 | Levent OZLER
Over the past few years, the Design Museum has been struggling through a protracted identity crisis.
The first sign of trouble came in 2004, when the museum's chairman, James Dyson, resigned in protest at the curatorial direction adopted by its director, Alice Rawsthorn.
Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner that bears his name, objected to the extent to which the museum had departed from its original role of promoting function-led, problem-solving design.
Under Rawsthorn, the museum had assumed a much expanded brief, staging exhibitions about the evolution of the video game and the film title sequences of Saul Bass.
For Dyson, the final straw proved to be an exhibition devoted to the 1950s flower arranger, Constance Spry.
A year later, the question of quite what the museum understood by the term "design" was raised again when Hillary Cottam picked up the museum's annual Designer of the Year award.
Cottam won the prize, in large part for her involvement in the remodelling of Kingsdale School, a failing south London comprehensive which had undergone a £10million overhaul.
Following the Cottam debacle, Sudjic decided to abandon the Designer of the Year award and has now replaced it with a new prize, the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year.
Focusing on products rather than the individuals that created them, the prize deftly sidesteps the problems of assigning authorship that scuppered the previous award.
more: telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/02/ (115)
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