2009 was a big year for the Prince Philip Designers Prize – the UK’s longest running design award celebrated its 50th anniversary.
To mark this special occasion, design commentator Kevin McCloud spoke to H.R.H. about his longstanding passion for good design.
Read a transcript of the interview
Winner
Andrew Ritchie
Andrew Ritchie’s single-minded dedication to the quality and usability of the Brompton folding bicycle won him the Prince Philip Designers Prize for 2009.
An ‘overwhelmed’ Ritchie received the award from the Duke of Edinburgh at a special reception at Buckingham Palace that also marked the Prize’s 50th anniversary.
The Brompton, wholly manufactured at the company’s factory in Brentford, sells in more than 30 countries, driving a successful business that has grown by 25% for the last three years.
The bike’s success is based on the ingenuity of its folding mechanism, its balance of functionality, durability and comfort, and a consistent 30-year commitment to refining the product and its 1,200 parts – many of which are unique to Brompton.
Ritchie, an engineering graduate, started designing the Brompton in the mid-1970s after seeing an early version of the Bickerton folding bicycle. ‘I’d had a folding bike in mind, and this was evidence that it could be done,’ he said. An initial design was finished within months, but it took more than a decade of development and looking for investment before the Brompton was ready for full production in 1987. ‘There were eureka moments, but it was mostly a lot of patience and waiting for muse to work,’ recalls Ritchie.
The business still dedicates 50% of management resource to design and development to keep itself ahead of growing competition in the fast-evolving folding bicycle market. ‘Improvements to the bike are a mixture of common sense and what I and the design team think will be fun, because if we think they’re fun, the rider will too,’ said Ritchie.
He added that he spends more time on designing the manufacturing process than the bike itself. ‘It’s all very well designing the product, but it has to be makeable.’
Special Commendations
Jeff Banks CBE
Jeff Banks has for decades combined fashion design with outstanding skills as a communicator and businessman. After opening a single shop in 1964 he launched his own label in 1969, an unusual move at the time. He went on to found his own Warehouse brand in 1970, turning it in to a fixture on the UK high street, and also opened highly successful Jeff Banks outlets in a number of UK department stores. In the mid-90s he added a corporate clothing business.
Jeff brought fashion design to a mass audience through The Clothes Show, which ran on BBC from 1986 – long before the later stream of makeover shows. He also contributes to education through involvement with many colleges and the Chartered Society of Designers.
Michael Peters OBE
In a 40-year career, graphic designer Michael Peters has played a substantial role in design being seen as vital to business success, as well as doing much to have design itself taken seriously as an industry and a profession. After setting up a design department at Collet, Dickenson & Pearce, one of the UK’s leading ad agencies, he set up his own business, which was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1983 as Michael Peters Group.
In 1992 he started Identica, which has become one of Europe’s leading brand and identity consultancies, and he now works again as Michael Peters and Partners, focusing on digital communications. His clients have included Nike, the BBC, Universal Studios, Vodafone, British Airways and the Conservative Party.
Other Nominees
David Adjaye
David Adjaye is one of the most prominent and influential architects of his generation. His work always sets out to innovate and intrigue, combining an artist’s sensibility and vision with diverse, multidisciplinary approaches to design. His geographically and culturally varied projects range from the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo to the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Denver.
Award-winning work such as the Idea Store in Whitechapel – a reinvention of the public lending library – show his ability to use design to respond to the needs of the community. And his collaborations with artists on the British Pavillion at the 2003 and 2005 Venice Biennale convey his emphasis on the experience as much as the function of architecture.
Hussein Chalayan MBE
Hussein Chalayan’s creativity has highly varied outlets – he runs his own fashion label, he is creative director of sportswear company Puma and he has made several films. But his reputation is founded on fashion, where he brings together artistic ambition, ingenuity and innovation in designs that carry an emotional intensity.
He is known as one of the most creative fashion designers of his generation. His work has been seen at the Venice Art Biennale, Tate Modern and the Design Museum among others, and his clients include the musician Bjork, who wears one of Hussein’s frocks as part of her signature look for live performances. His films, meanwhile, explore our relationship with fashion and how clothes shape identity.
Wayne Hemingway MBE
Wayne Hemingway combines entrepreneurial skill with wit, sensitivity to popular culture and a commitment to design’s potential as a social force. He first made a name as a fashion designer with Red or Dead, the highly successful and characteristically subversive label founded with his wife Gerardine, which tore up the rule book to combine originality with affordability. With Hemingway Design, he is now specialising in affordable, sustainable housing and fighting for higher standards in housebuilding and design.
Always a visible media presence, Wayne has done much to promote design as something that solves problems as well as bringing delight, turning his creativity to things as diverse as transforming the Danish Embassy’s car park into a cardboard exhibition space and developing the first pause-and-rewind digital radio.
Eric Parry
Eric Parry’s architecture is based on the idea that old and new can combine to enhance each other, and the belief that architecture should enrich daily life and culture. After founding his practice in 1983, work ranged from Pembroke College, Cambridge, to luxury apartments in Kuala Lumpur. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for an office development at 30 Finsbury Square in London which combines a seemingly conservative stone exterior with a radical steel and glass interior.
Eric’s work is anchored in the designer’s creative process, using freehand drawing to think through problems, test ideas, bring concepts to life and communicate them to others. Recent results include the renewal of St Martin-in-the Fields Church in London and the award-winning 5 Aldermanbury Square, again in London.
Peter Saville
Peter Saville put graphic design on the map for millions of people through his record sleeve and poster artwork that helped to create the Manchester music scene in the 1980s. Defying Punk, he created a new style that combined modern, industrial elements with classical art, producing sleeves for Joy Division, New Order and others which became instant classics.
Later, Peter moved into fashion art direction and interiors, working with German textile manufacturer Kvadrat among others. He is also Creative Director of the City of Manchester, with a remit covering transport, architecture and sustainability. Peter contributes to education as a visiting professor at University of the Arts London, among other roles, and gives talks and lectures around the world.
Jay Smith and Howard Milton
After working together at Michael Peters & Partners in the late 1970s, graphic designers Jay Smith and Howard Milton started their own business in 1980, and then had to do it again after the recession of the early 1990s. This experience was a sound basis for work that combines creative excellence with commercial strength for clients such as KitKat, Lucozade, NatWest, Gillette, Dulux, Sharwoods, Switch and Sainsbury’s.
In 29 years, the pair have worked with 15% of the FTSE 100, three out of the five top UK financial services brands and more than a quarter of the top 100 grocery brands. The numbers show their effectiveness – a new egg box design added £40m to Tesco sales, while Boots’ Natural Collection brand surpassed the sales of its competitor, Body Shop. They are currently the calming voice of the government's swine flu communications.