The Young Designer’s Prize is an annual competition organised by the Vilnius Academy of Arts to discover and celebrate the most promising graduation works of design students. „This year was the fourteenth edition of the competition and we received 80 applications from seven Lithuanian and foreign higher education institutions. We are delighted that the Young Designer Prize is gaining more and more visibility and that universities that have not yet participated in the competition are submitting applications. The entries are divided into five categories: product, communication, fashion, interior design and design research,” says Daina Eičaitė, curator of the Young Designer Prize and project manager at Design Innovation Centre of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
The international jury of the competition has selected fifteen projects, which will be exhibited at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design of Lithuanian National Museum of Arts (Arsenalo st. 3A, Vilnius) from 5-29 September. The projects presented in the exhibition boldly explore history, various social and ecological problems and seek solutions to them by applying various design methodologies.
„I am delighted that Lithuanian National Museum of Art is joining the initiative of the organisers of the Young Designer Prize competition. The exhibition of the young creators’ works at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design has already become a beautiful tradition, allowing us to feel the pulse of the ideas of the young generation of creators, to be inspired and to think about the issues of the time. People make things, and then things make people, and the visionary ideas presented in the exhibition of this competition should be seen as a preview of the innovations that will shape our future. It is curious to see what problems young creators are working on and what recipes they are proposing, as well as to fantasise about what exhibits we will use to fill the Museum’s collections in the unpredictable future,” says Jolanta Marcišauskytė-Jurašienė, Deputy Director General for Exhibitions and Education.
This year’s submissions were judged and the content of the exhibition was compiled by a select jury of design professionals from abroad: Andreia Garcia (Portugal), architect, founder of Architectural Affairs and director of the Art(e)Facts Knowledge Biennial, Clara Tosi Pamphili (Italy), applied arts professional and course leader at the Department of Fashion and Costume Design at NABA University; Mike Bond, graphic designer and founder of Bond & Coyne design agency (UK); Pierre Foulonneau, product designer and lecturer in food design at L’École de design Nantes Atlantique (France); Simon Anund, furniture designer, architect, founder and creative director of VERK furniture manufacturing company (Sweden).
The architecture of the exhibition follows the logic of grouping – the participants’ projects are presented side by side, thus presenting different categories and reflecting the diverse content of the competition. In the exhibition space, each object takes on its own organic form of display, which aims to reveal both the originality of the projects and the authors’ individual approach to the discipline.
The structure of the exhibition operates on the principle of contrast – the rigid metal structure symbolises the foundation from which each author rests, while the organic form of the wood texture represents the developed intuition that varies between the frameworks of the discipline and the established standards.
Organiser Vilnius Academy of Arts Design Innovation Centre
Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Information sponsor lrt.lt
Sponsors: Nordcurrent, Jung, Būkčia, Woodline
Partners: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the State Patent Bureau of the Republic of Lithuania, European Union Intellectual Property Office, Intelektinė.lt, JCDecaux Lietuva
Exhibition Architecture Vytautas Gečas
Exhibition Graphic Design Gintarė Baryzaitė