Design Week Awards 2022 opens for entries

We are excited to announce the launch of the Design Week Awards 2022, which we aim to bring to our largest ever audience.

Having already undertaken a major overhaul of categories to make them as relevant to your work as possible, this year we’re adding the Design, Climate, Action award, which recognises work that is making a tangible difference to the health of the planet.

It could be a physical or digital product, a service, a piece of visual communication or another type of deign entirely.

Entrants must be able to demonstrate that their design is improving the health of the planet as part of a sustainable endeavour. This award takes its name from a Design Week series, which is exploring how designers and their clients can use design to help tackle the climate crisis.

The Design Climate Action award can be found in the Landmark Awards section alongside Social Design, Service Design and Best In-house Design Team. We’re running the Designing Out COVID 19 award again as we saw some highly innovative entries in that category last year and are aware of more great work which has been happening in the fight against COVID over the last 12 months. As ever, Rising Star is free to enter.

Our Communication section reflects the broad nature of modern branding work with specific awards for Identity Launches and Identity Rebrands, 2D Packaging – Graphics and 3D Structural Packaging, as well Brand Strategy, Writing for Design and more.

When we reassessed the Digital section in 2020 following consultation with leading designers, it allowed us to think less in terms of outputs (like Website Design) and more in terms of beauty, craft and user experiences across digital platforms. To this end our Interaction Design category celebrates design work that engages with end users in a meaningful way and provides a valuable user experience.

The Products and Furniture section is where you will find Consumer and Industrial Product Design as separate categories alongside Furniture Design.

Last year we made some concessions for work covered in our Spaces section: Exhibition; Retail; Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics; Hospitality; and Workplace, noting that some work had been disrupted by the pandemic.

In recognition of this we adapted the entry criteria for these categories. This means entries will be judged against their brief and long term goals, despite any COVID interruption they may have faced.

Given that the UK didn’t come out of a phased lockdown until July 2021 and that other lockdowns have carried on around the world intermittently since, we are leaving this caveat in place.

Also if your entry has been specifically designed with COVID compliancy or restricted operation in mind, it will be judged on this basis. This might apply to any of the categories coming under Spaces.

Our eligibility period is for projects that have taken or will take place between March 2021 and March 2022, a period in which exhibitions roared back, so we are looking forward to seeing what is entered here.

In short we are taking an even-handed approach to anything which is entered into Spaces.

Our largest ever panel of independent judges will be looking for design excellence across the entire spectrum of the design industry and we are looking forward to announcing them in the coming weeks.

In total there are 32 categories to explore across five broad sections. Everything you need for entry is here and we’ll be updating the Awards page and the Design Week site with more information soon, so stay tuned.

Early bird deadline 4 March.