Beazley: Designs of the Year 2018. This item is unavailable.Beazley: Designs of the Year 2018

Now in its eleventh year, the Design Museum’s Beazley Designs of the Year award and exhibition showcase the most innovative, relevant and thought-provoking projects in contemporary design.

From the first iPhone to Zaha Hadid’s final building, the nominations for the award have spanned the fields of architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport. Introduced by Deyan Sudjic and guest curator Aric Chen of M+ in Hong Kong, this illustrated book brings together all the nominated designs for 2018, along with the reasons for their selection by an international group of design experts, practitioners and critics, including Iwan Baan and Hans Ulrich Obrist. It is a snapshot of the most exciting things happening in design today.

At the beginning of the second decade of its life, the essence of the concept remains the same. A wide and international group of expert nominators have been invited to put forward up to three projects each that for them reflect significant new directions in six fields, from architecture to transport. The results are put together by a guest curator to form an exhibition at the Design Museum. A jury selects winners in each category, as well as one overall design of the year.

The Design Museum has published an accompanying catalogue for the award and exhibition over the past ten years, which was marked by the publication of the ten-year anniversary book Designs of our Time: 10 Years of Designs of the Year.

Aric Chen is curator-at-large for M+, the new museum of visual culture under construction in Hong Kong, where from 2012 to 2018 he led the formation of the museum’s design and architecture collection and programme. He now lives in Shanghai.

Eleanor Watson is assistant curator at the Design Museum. Her previous exhibitions include Beazley Designs of the Year 2017 and Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution. Eleanor is responsible for the museum’s programme of free public displays, and is currently working on a etrospective of work by architect Peter Barber.

Deyan Sudjic is the director of the Design Museum in London. He was previously editor of Domus magazine, and founding editor of Blueprint magazine. His portfolio of publications includes The Language of Cities (2017), Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things (2015) and B is for Bauhaus (2014), amongst others. He was made an OBE in 2000.