IT’S PERSONAL
DESIGN IS THE STORY OF HUMAN intervention. Without an architect, a building is just a box. Without a UX designer, a website is just a string of code. In a year defined by lightningfast advancements in artificial intelligence, it can be hard to remember that it’s humans—for better or worse—who ultimately shape the built world.
Behind each of the winning projects featured in this year’s Innovation by Design Awards is a team of people who challenged themselves to solve thorny problems. Their ingenuity has resulted in products, buildings, tools, and ideas that push their respective fields forward.
Some honorees, such as Canva, Fast Company’s Design Company of the Year, are diving headlong into artificial intelligence with new tools that show how AI can be a collaborator with humans—not a replacement for them. Other companies are creating innovative products that can be used by a wider range of humans: Estée Lauder’s Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant helps people with visual impairment apply cosmetics, and Jansport’s Adaptive Collection provides new backpack options for wheelchair users and others with limited dexterity.
The most effective design solutions are those that acknowledge the context of the world in which they’ll operate. Take the North Face’s circular design products, made from fabrics and components that lend themselves to easy deconstruction and reusability. At a time when fashion accounts for around 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, smarter clothing is not a panacea, but it is a small and promising effort to change the way people think about the afterlife of their wardrobe. Similarly, projects like Snøhetta’s water-permeable pavers and MAD Architects’ Quzhou Sports Park show how inventive designs can help us retrofit our cities to make them more sustainable and resilient.
Design might not be able to save the world, but it can play a significant role in improving lives. Just look at the Lifeport Liver Transporter, an ingenious new system for transporting human livers that offers transplant patients a literal lifeline, or Dandi, an analytics platform that holds companies to account regarding their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. These projects are more than a reminder that creativity is a distinctly human trait; they’re evidence that it takes more than an algorithm to understand—and address—humanity’s most pressing needs. —Liz Stinson
IN THE AGE OF remote and hybrid work, Figma—which for eight years has been offering tools to help people in different locations work together simultaneously on a single design project—has become a go-to platform for collaborative visual design. Yet it’s not only designers who need to share visuals. “You have Slack, you have Google Docs, you have these core communication tools, but you didn’t really have a visual one,” says Noah Levin, Figma’s VP of design.
Figma has recently rolled out a variety of tools to enable collaboration among other types of workers who need to share visual ideas, such as managers, engineers, copywriters, and researchers. Along with its two-year-old whiteboarding platform, Figjam, it now has a presentation mode called Spotlight and a newly released “Dev Mode,” which helps designers and developers work together.
In addition to serving corporate customers like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Kimberly-clark, Figma provides Chromebook versions of software for free to K–12 students and teachers across the U.S. One new offering helps classmates collaborate on projects while allowing teachers to build visually compelling lessons on subjects from biology to literature.
In September 2022, design software giant Adobe announced plans to acquire
Figma for roughly $20 billion— an eyebrow-raising price that has drawn attention from across tech and finance (and from regulatory agencies).
The aim is to merge Figma’s collaborative capabilities with Adobe’s powerful creative tools. —Steven Melendez
OTRIVIN AIR LAB showcases one of nature’s most enduring, powerful, and often overlooked organisms: algae. Created by London-based architecture and design firm ecologic-studio in partnership with consumer healthcare company Otrivin, the public laboratory and algae garden sits inside a timberframe structure within London’s Building Centre, an innovation-focused exhibition hall. There, biodesigners collect biomass created by the algae as they mine CO2 from the air. These biopolymer filaments are then fed into a 3D printer to create new products, such as neti pots, stools, and bottles. Air Lab—part classroom, part exhibition— illustrates a path toward a circular city. The lab, says ecoLogic-Studio cofounder Marco Poletto, places algae in the protagonist’s role, emphasizing how powerful they can be in purifying the air and creating new life. “Design is an enabling tool for a more participatory approach for shaping a sustainable future,” says Poletto. —Nicole Gull Mcelroy