Design forecast

For years, design awards have been quiet affairs, conducted by insiders in sleek pullovers (the "elite Designers Against Ikea" of the Ikea ad). But recently two awards have blown the business open, inviting the public to interpret and vote for that slippery notion: "good design." In March, the second year of Blueprint magazine's "Blueprint sessions" began—a series of four open debates between design luminaries and other public figures to decide the architect, product designer, interior designer and furniture designer of the year. Held in the awesome interior of Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields, the winners in each category are to be decided by audience secret ballot, and will be announced on 24th March. Meanwhile, the Design Museum has opened its third designer of the year exhibition, also inviting members of the public to contribute their vote to a judging process that will culminate on 9th June, when a single winner from the four nominees will be chosen and presented with £25,000.

Both awards are a response to booming public interest. Since 2001, visitor figures to the Design Museum have increased by 20 per cent, and recent exhibitions have drawn around 60,000 visitors. Although the prizes are perhaps tapping into an audience for "designer" products and television make-over shows, they also draw the public into a larger argument about what an overall concept of design might look like.

And not just an argument, but a pitched battle. Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum, presides over a shortlist which ranges from Jasper Morrison (classy product designer for Rowenta) and Hilary Cottam (champion of improved design in schools and hospitals) to Timorous Beasties (the inspired Glasgow textile-design team) and a Penguin paperback designer. What design concept unites such different crafts? The question makes people angry. Last September, Design Museum chairman Jeremy Dyson (he of the bagless vacuum cleaner) resigned on the grounds that under Rawsthorn's directorship the museum had "become a style showcase, instead of upholding its mission to encourage serious design of the manufactured object." A similar debate has opened up in Blueprint, with Virginia Postrell, a respected right-wing American columnist, fighting the corner for style and sensuality in the March issue, while James Woudhuysen, in the April issue, stands up for those old-fashioned Bauhaus design principles, of form following function.

At the V&A, the original unified idea of design is being revisited. The "International Arts and Crafts" show unfolds the principle that first transformed the practice of architecture and interior design worldwide. The germ lay in a letter John Ruskin wrote to his friend and admirer, the designer and manufacturer William Morris in 1878: "How much good might be done by the establishment of an exhibition… in which the Right doing, instead of the Clever doing, of all that men know how to do, should be the test of acceptance." The result was the foundation of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, in London, in 1888, and the onward march of Morris's Ruskinian idea that good design, rooted in sound manufacturing practice, is the source of all that makes for a good life. It upheld virtues of honesty and simplicity, the importance of practical, artisanal skills, and married progressive socialist politics to a paternalistic, medievalising nostalgia. In the end, the arts and crafts movement lost its way, overtaken by 20th-century modernism and the explosion of possibilities offered by technology. But residual nostalgia for such certainty is still evident in Terence Conran's frequent quoting of Morris's dictum: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." It is hard to see any similar consensus about design's value emerging now. But at least it seems the public is directly engaged in doing the clever, and maybe even the right thing too.