| September 29, 2009 New York, NY -- Metropolis, the leading magazine for architecture and design professionals, announces the focus for its annual Next Generation® Design Competition: ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE. The winner receives a $10,000 prize and the kind of career-building attention that previous winners have enjoyed: they've become leaders in their fields, the subject of PBS TV series, and received notice from manufacturers, design firms, governments, important design schools, major NGOs - and, of course, clients. Next Generation® 2010, sponsored by Herman Miller, is expected to attract hundreds of entries from around the world. Entries for ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE are due January 29, 2010. Metropolis established the Next Generation® Design Competition in 2003 to publicize the conviction that drives everything that Metropolis does editorially: Good design is not a frill, not an expensive luxury, but is basic to how things work, from buildings, to cities, to consumer products and energy grids. Faced with great environmental challenges, we must all assure that the buildings and devices in our world are not only functional, but contribute to a sustainable way of life in the future. Everything we use, live in and work in must work better for this to happen. And great design can make this happen just as much as great engineering and great dedication. ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE, the Next Generation® Design Competition, challenges designers of all kinds - architects, interior designers, product designers, landscape designers, graphic designers, and communication designers. We are looking for entries that propose ONE DESIGN FIX to our designed environment, fixes that can be applied to the way that the designer himself or herself may actually live today: the products we use at home or work, our home or workplace, our city, or any commercial application. We are looking for a design fix that may be quite humble or affect only a small thing, but which in scale, deployed throughout our society, can improve our future by making it more sustainable, energy-efficient, less damaging to the environment. The winner will probably not be something that is explicitly environmentally re-engineered. It will be a brilliant, possibly quite small and - naturally - beautiful and elegant fix that will benefit the environment in the long run. The winning entries will display the entrant's training, imagination and passion for improvement in a completely unexpected way. We are looking for first-rate design imagination applied to a difficult, overlooked or completely mundane problem - resulting in a solution that is practical, clearly thought out and presented, and will have real-world consequences for the human community. "We are the leading design industry magazine with a culture of sustainability," says Susan S. Szenasy, Metropolis editor-in-chief. "So we're putting our money where our editorial heart is. We believe that the design profession has the tools and techniques that the world needs, and that good design is a way of solving problems." Horace Havemeyer III, Metropolis' publisher, adds: "Designers are fixers. And Metropolis wants to show how much good design - not just good intentions - can add to the building of a more sustainable world in the future."
"We are particularly pleased that Herman Miller, Inc. is sponsoring Next Generation® 2010," says Peter Lenahan from Metropolis magazine. "Herman Miller says that as a company, they design 'furnishings and related services that improve the human experience wherever people work, heal, learn and live. We think that Herman Miller's values are perfectly aligned with what Next Generation® 2010 ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE is trying to achieve."
The competition will be judged by a distinguished international panel facilitated by Ms. Szenasy, consisting of:
Tama Daffy Day, FASID, IIDA, LEED AP, Principal at Perkins+Will Ellen Lupton, Director, Graphic Design MFA Program, Maryland Institute College of Art Joel Makower, Co-founder and chairman, Greener World Media and Clean Edge Christopher Sharples,R.A. Co-founder and Partner, SHoP Architects, P.C. Entries for ONE DESIGN FIX FOR THE FUTURE are due January 29, 2010. For full information about how to enter, visit http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen.
About Next Generation®
The Metropolis Next Generation® Design Competition was created in 2003 to promote activism, social involvement, and entrepreneurship in young designers. Metropolis saw the need for a new type of competition, one that went beyond the usual beauty pageants for finished projects, a competition that would generate and reward ideas.
The Next Generation® winners and runners-up are a testament to the success of this mission. Each project recognized has embodied the core values of good design-incorporating systems thinking, sustainability, accessibility, materials exploration, historic relevance and technology-while forwarding our thinking on what designers can accomplish. The breadth of proposals has been stunning: building projects, urban planning and community building schemes, responsive interior environments, population pressure issues, new materials, ergonomics, product design, social and housing solutions, environmental management, water purity, and waste disposal in crisis situations and so on. The prize of $10,000 in seed money for developing the projects, plus the publicity they receive, have helped winners' and runners-ups' projects leap from the drawing board to implementation and production. http://www.metropolismag.com/nextgen
About Metropolis magazine
Professionals in all areas of design--architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, technology, industrial design, and graphic design--rely on Metropolis magazine each month for dynamic journalism that spans the gamut of their profession. The Metropolis Tour, hosted by more than 70 leading architecture and design firms in North America since 2007, explores today's increasingly complex design issues with lessons of regional architecture and modern preservation, innovation and research in design, and features compelling Metropolis-produced films. Visit http://www.metropolismag.com to subscribe to the magazine and access a wealth of continually updated content and professional design resources.
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