So Jamie Hewlett, animator behind the virtual band Gorillaz, is officially Britain's designer of the year. However, chances are you won't have noticed. When Apple's Jonathan Ive won the inaugural event three years ago, it was announced live on national television; since then it has plummeted down the media agenda.
Britain's design industry, so long in the shadow of fine art and architecture, has had a couple of attempts at creating a prize that would lift it out of the trade magazines and into the nationals. Back in 2001, for example, Perrier Jouet and Selfridges clubbed together in an ill-fated attempt to create design's version of the Turner prize. However, when the joint winners, Ron Arad and Jasper Morrison, were announced by chairman of the judges, Christopher Frayling, the audience spontaneously burst into a chorus of boos. It came as absolutely no surprise when the whole fiasco was swept quietly under the carpet.
Spool forward five years and the reaction to Hewlett's victory (announced by the chairman of the judges, er, Christopher Frayling) was definitely more upbeat. Dig a little deeper, though, and the overwhelming sense in the room was that, yes, the right person had probably won but, with such a flawed shortlist, the prize itself (if not the £25,000 that comes with it) was virtually worthless.
All awards schemes are PR-led, to a greater or lesser extent. However, few manage to be quite as vacuous as this one. How on earth can you pit someone like Cameron Sinclair, who runs an organisation that provides relief to areas affected by disaster, with Tom Dixon, a designer who makes experimental furniture that's generally specified in upmarket restaurants and bars? And what criteria exactly were the judges applying when they decided that the Guardian's excellent redesign was less worthy than Hewlett's cartoons?
The Design Museum's official line is that the shortlist is drawn up by the judges themselves—which included last year's winner, Hilary Cottam and the ubiquitous Kevin McCloud—but I have my doubts. With the exception of the British Council's Emily Campbell, these aren't people you see doing the hard yards around the aisles of the international exhibitions, nor do they regularly turn up to the tiny openings and launches that happen weekly across London. So how did they arrive at their four finalists? The fact of the matter is that there has always been a strong whiff of insider trading around the scheme. Is it any coincidence that both the Guardian's creative director Mark Porter and Tom Dixon were invited to give lectures at the Design Museum just before the shortlist was drawn up, for instance? In Dixon's case it proved to be something of a farce as, by his own admission, he couldn't tell his audience anything about his new work until after the Milan furniture fair. As Milan opened well after the contenders for the award were announced, one can only assume that the judges were given access to prototypes denied to critics and public alike. If they felt the work was that good surely it should have waited until 2007? Or was the museum so desperate to get one of the few names in the industry to have crossed over into the mainstream consciousness on the shortlist at any cost?
Now in its fourth year, another huge problem with the prize is that it keeps being given to people who aren't actually designers. Hewlett is a brilliant illustrator and animator, but that doesn't mean he belongs here. Indeed, he recently admitted in Icon magazine that he didn't know why he'd been nominated in the first place. Two years ago the prize went to Daniel Brown, a fine digital artist, but someone who would look more at home in the Beck's Futures awards at the ICA than at the Design Museum. And, most controversially, last year it was handed to the Design Council's Hilary Cottam for her reforming work in the public sector. The problem was that for all the guff spoken at the time about "new design," Cottam remains a project manager. It's rather like giving the Oscar for best director to a producer. Year after year, any goodwill that the designer of the year award had when it launched has inexorably drained away.
If the industry's other major award, The Jerwood prize for furniture—where contenders are judged by a panel rooted deeply in the industry on their work over a five-year period—is a genuinely heavyweight contest, then increasingly the designer of the year resembles nothing more than a couple of supermodels in a champagne-fuelled catfight. As has been widely reported, Alice Rawsthorn, the Design Museum director and panel chairwoman, left during the judging process. Rawsthorn brought a dash of glamour to an organisation that until then had been worthy but dull. However, I hope her successor, the critic and curator Deyan Sudjic, will admit that the designer of the year award hasn't worked—and watching his distinctly reticent body language on stage during the ceremony, I suspect he will.
If the museum must hand out a prize, it needs to balance the glitz with more integrity. And it could start by actually giving it to a genuine designer.
