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London Design Festival 2014 Medal Winners

Each year, London Design Festival recognises the contribution made by leading design figures and emerging talents to London and the industry with four London Design Medal awarded:

The London Design Medal: the highest accolade bestowed upon an individual who has distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.

Design Innovation Medal: celebrates entrepreneurship in all its forms, both locally and internationally. It honours an individual for whom design lies at the core of their development and success.

Emerging Design Medal: recognises an impact made on the design scene within five or so years of graduation.

Lifetime Achievement Medal: honours a significant and fundamental contribution to the design industry over the course of a career.

London Design Medal: Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

Supported by Panerai

Brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have been working together for over ten years. Their collaboration is a permanent dialogue nourished by their distinct personalities and a shared notion of diligence with the intention to reach more balance and fineness.

Today, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec design for numerous manufacturers. At the same time, they maintain an experimental activity which is essential to the development of their work at Galerie Kreo in Paris, where four exhibitions of their designs have been held between 2001 and 2012.

The duo also embark on occasional architectural projects such as the Floating House in 2006, the Camper stores in Paris, Copenhagen and Rome (2009-2011), the Casa Camper Hotel’s restaurant, Dos Palillos in Berlin (2010) and the Kvadrat showrooms in Stockholm (2006) and Copenhagen (2009). Several exhibitions in major national museums have been devoted to their work and many designs have been added to their permanent collections. In 2012, Phaidon Press published Works, a comprehensive monographic book about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, which joins several other books published over their career so far.

Emerging Design Medal: Roland Lamb

Supported by Swarovski

Roland Lamb is the founder and CEO of ROLI and the inventor of the Seaboard. With wide-ranging interests in music, technology, design, and philosophy, he leads a company of creative polymaths who are inventing new, joyful ways for humans to interact with technology.

Lamb grew up in rural New Hampshire, where he was homeschooled. His father is a jazz pianist, and Roland started on the piano when he was a toddler. He started his first business - a jazz cafe for other students - while attending Summerhill, an alternative school in the UK. Lamb designed the first application of the SEA Interface—the Seaboard GRAND—a musical instrument that reimagines the keyboard as a sensitive, soft 3D surface that enables unprecedented intuitive manipulation of the fundamental characteristics of sound.

A lifelong musician, Lamb has applied his award-winning approach to building pressure-sensing interfaces to create new musical instruments that bring together elements of traditional and electronic instruments. He is the founder and CEO of Sea Labs, a fast-growing music technology start-up creating interactive devices.

Design Innovation Medal: Nicholas Roope

Supported by PCH

Nicolas Roope is a British industrial and digital media designer and entrepreneur. His career focuses on a unique combination of product design, digital media and business development. In 2014 he received the PCH Design Innovation Medal. The Design Innovation Medal celebrates entrepreneurship in all its forms, both locally and internationally. It honours an individual for whom design lies at the core of their development and success.

Through his 20 years experience as a designer and conceptual thinker at the forefront of the digital media revolution, Roope has gained some incredible experiences along the way. His most potent insight is the realisation that digital - once and for all - is connecting everything, melting borders, divisions and prejudices along the way. In over two decades in the business, Roope has been the founder of numerous companies and organisations that have proved hugely influential across technology and design. Companies include Antirom, an art collective formed by Roope in 1994 alongside Andy Cameron and several others, which was innovative in its early ideas of the possibility of interactive media; Poke London, founded in 2001, which continues to demonstrate how brands can use digital approaches to engage with audiences both online and off; and Hulger, a product design company that has found particular fame with its Plumen series of light bulbs.

The original Plumen bulb, released in 2011, is widely acclaimed as the first designer energy saving light bulb and is now included in the permanent design collections at MoMA, V&A and Cooper-Hewitt. Nicolas is still amazed by how little the link between creativity and value is understood and managed in business. If he has one goal it is to help to change this through demonstration.

Lifetime Achievement Medal: Lord Richard Rogers

Lord Richard Rogers, founder of Rogers, Stirk Harbour + Partners, is a pre-eminent architect of his generation who rose to prominence with the Pompidou Centre in 1977.

Rogers is the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate, the recipient of the RIBA Gold Medal in 1985 and winner of the 1999 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Medal. Rogers was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 1986, knighted in 1991 and made a member of the House of Lords in 1996. In 2008 he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.

Rogers sadly passed away in 2021 and his legacy goes beyond his architecture, to the way we think and work.