Designs of the Year 2014, Design Museum

The Design Museum’s yearly celebration of the best new architectural, digital, graphic and domestic inventions is here again. 

This exhibitio sees the coalface of traditional industry collide with the forefront of nano and digital capabilities. It’s where the design world’s glitterati (Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield) meet the freshest startup seedlings in a showcase of work across seven fields: Transport, Products, Graphics, Furniture, Fashion, Digital and Architecture. 

If you’ve been to the Designs of the Year Exhibition before in its seven year history, you’ll know to expect a large dose of glam in amongst the breath-taking ingenuity of the 76 exhibits on display. 

‘Kate Moss’s favourite app’ will be one of this year’s instant crowd pleasers, and whether the billing puts you off or not, McCann Melbourne’s Dumb Ways to Die is a pretty irresistible bundle of audiovisual fun (with a great take-home message for kids about train safety) that you should by no means miss.

Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan, designed in collaboration with Patrick Schumacher, is another must-see. A 619,000 sqare-foot, bright white angle-less wonder in the centre of Baku, it’s written into Azeri history as part of a regeneration project thrown into overdrive when the Eurovision Song Contest landed in the capital in 2012. It’s a concertedly transformative counterpoint to what’s been described as the ‘ rigid and often monumental Soviet architecture that is so prevalent in Baku ’.

On a smaller scale, but packing no less in the way of extraordinary imagination, Catalan De Ocon’s PET lamps offer a gorgeous antidote to the profligacy of plastic waste, and David Swann’s ABC syringe, which changes colour when no longer sterile, has true potential to save lives. 

We also particularly love the Castledown ‘dyslexic font’ family by The Entente, originally designed to assist dyslexic pupils at Castledown Primary in East Sussex. In headteacher Neil Small’s words: ‘The number of fonts that do not have an ‘a’ written as we present it to children and the number ‘4’ as we would like the children to write it is huge.’ It’s now being rolled out in hopes of unifying typography and literacy teaching in all UK primary schools. 

You’re likely to lose hours in this truly fascinating show, and come away awestruck by the infectious enterprisingness of designers who are currently daring to think differently - and shaping our world as a consequence.

Someday, as the Design Museum points out, the other museums will be exhibiting this stuff. See it here first.