IDA Awards Stories

This week and next, the International Design Awards have handed the their Instagram account over to its jury to share their thoughts on design. Having taken the account's reigns today, an IDA judge since 2008, I shared the qualities that I look for when casting my votes, which are:

• Designs that seek to heal, not harm the natural world.

• Cathedral thinking [thinking beyond the needs of the current generation].

• Designs that seek to reconcile the fact that many beautiful materials, such as fluorite (pictured above) come from often ugly extraction processes.

• Designs that emulate the processes of nature, such as they that formed the Glass sponge (Hexactinellid) pictured below.

• Through the prism of geological time, great design, like the light patterns you see below, is ephemeral. ​