“There are certainly many websites that record ‘best practices’ but not the worst. The prize is setting out to change that—to turn into a repository of unloved and unsuccessful projects.”
With that intended mission to focus on unsuccessful designs and finding solutions to rectify the problems, Cameron Sinclair founded Dead Prize—an award “to celebrate engineering, architecture and designs that have had a negative impact on the planet.”
The TED prize awardee told Gizmodo, “Designers are constantly told to find a problem to fix but often these problems have been created by our industry and often ignored. They get labeled as ‘not our problem’ and ‘it’s the way things are.’ Once we understand the baseline of detrimental impact, we can design against it.”
With an emphasis that Dead Prize is not meant to shame, the award aims to zoom in on why designs failed and how improvements can be done.
Nominations, due on 1 November 2014, could be tweeted @deadprize or emailed to info@deadprize.com.
Sinclair said, “For the Dead Prize we are not only seeking nominations from industrial design and architecture but at the broader definition of design—from the designing of financial systems that forced thousands of families into bankruptcy, to designs of extraction methods such as hydraulic fracking, which has been responsible for man-made earthquakes.”
Head on over here to find out more.
[via Gizmodo, images via Dead Prize]