London Design Festival 2025 Medal Winners
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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 Medals awarded.
On Monday 15 September, the London Design Medals ceremony was held at V&A East Storehouse, where leading figures from across the design and creative industries gathered to celebrate this year’s winners. Guests of honour arrived in style courtesy of a fleet of Lotus cars, before heading into a reception and evening of speeches set against the backdrop of one of the world’s most important design collections.
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The 2025 Medal recipients embody excellence across a wide spectrum of creative practice — from groundbreaking product and lighting design to architectural innovation, accessibility advocacy and contemporary craft.
Lifetime Achievement Medal: Lord Norman Foster
Honours a significant and fundamental contribution to the design industry over the course of a career.
The London Design Medal: Michael Anastassiades OBE
The highest accolade bestowed upon an individual who has distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.
Design Innovation Medal: Sinéad Burke
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: Rio Kobayashi
Recognises an individual or practice that has made a recent impact on the design scene and has an emerging practice showing design promise.
The London Design Medals are generously supported by Mayor of London, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Lotus and Fortnum & Mason.
Lifetime Achievement Medal: Lord Norman Foster
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The Lifetime Achievement Medal was presented to Lord Norman Foster by Jo Newton, Director of Buying at Fortnum & Mason. It honours an individual who has made significant and fundamental contributions to the design industry over their career.
Lord Norman Foster is Founder and Executive Chairman of Foster + Partners, a global studio for architecture, urbanism and design, rooted in sustainability. Over more than five decades, the practice has pioneered a sustainable approach to architecture and urbanism through a wide range of work, from masterplans to offices, cultural buildings, airports and industrial design.
Lord Foster has established an international reputation with projects as diverse as the New German Parliament in the Reichstag in Berlin, 30 St Mary Axe, popularly known as the Gherkin, Chek Lap Kok International Airport and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong, Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt, Willis Faber & Dumas Head Office in Ipswich, the Millennium Bridge in London and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.
He has been awarded architecture’s highest accolades, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Praemium Imperiale Award for Architecture in Japan, the RIBA Royal Gold medal and the AIA Gold medal. He is president of the Norman Foster Foundation, based in Madrid. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1997 and in 1999 he was honoured with a Life Peerage, becoming Lord Foster of Thames Bank OM.
The 2025 Lifetime Achievement Medal is supported by Fortnum & Mason.
"I am deeply honoured to receive this special award. Since my early childhood, design has been an integral part of my life and. I feel extremely privileged to have indulged in this passion every day of my life since.” - Lord Norman Foster
London Design Medal: Michael Anastassiades OBE
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The London Design Medal was presented to Michael Anastassiades by Ben Payne, VP Design at Lotus. It is the highest accolade bestowed upon an individual who has distinguished themselves within the industry and demonstrated consistent design excellence.
Michael Anastassiades is a Cypriot-born British designer based in London. He initially trained as a civil engineer at Imperial College, before undertaking a Master’s degree in Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art. He founded his studio in 1994, followed by his eponymous brand in 2007. His studio works across lighting, furniture, objects and spatial design. He has designed products for manufacturers, produced signature limited edition collections, and has presented solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide. In 2015, Anastassiades received the Royal Designer for Industry award from the Royal Society of Arts in recognition of outstanding contribution to lighting design. He has gone on to win several awards, including the ADI Compasso d’Oro in 2020. In 2024, he received an OBE from King Charles III for services to design.
The 2025 London Design Medal is supported by Lotus.
"It’s a great honour to feel at home and be acknowledged about a dream that you never knew was going to work out.” - Michael Anastassiades
Design Innovation Medal: Sinéad Burke
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The Design Innovation Medal was presented to Sinéad Burke by Justine Simons, Deputy Mayor for Culture & Creative Industries. It celebrates entrepreneurship in all its forms, both locally and internationally, and honours an individual for whom design lies at the core of their development and success.
Sinéad Burke's life and work has been framed by her drive to make the world more accessible for all disabled and otherwise marginalised people. Sinéad is a little person with Acondraplasia, and her experience training as a teacher revealed how spaces are rarely accessible for disabled people seeking employment and success. A blog series about lack of representation in fashion led to opportunities to challenge people in power about adaptive fashion and accessible systems. Burke has spoken to leaders across the world including at the World Economic Forum, the UN, the White House, TEDNY, and many more to make the case for including disabled people in every room where decisions are made. In 2020, Burke founded the strategic consultancy 'Tilting the Lens' to build an accessible and fairer world. Along with her majority-disabled team, they create accessible public spaces and advise on recruitment, workflows, and culture changes, working with clients on 4 continents including Chanel, Gucci, Microsoft, NASA, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Burke has held honorary positions on the Irish Council of State, the Irish Future of Media Commission, chairs the ITV Cultural Advisory Council, Gucci’s Global Equity Board, and is a Contributing Editor at British Vogue. She has also worked with partners to create better pipelines for disabled creatives, this includes fully funded scholarships for disabled designers to train at Parsons School of Design in New York, and for disabled writers in Film & TV with the National Talent Academy in Ireland.
"It is a privilege to receive the Design Innovation Award. As a majority Disabled team, we’ve seen few places acknowledge the innovation and intellectual property of lived experience. At Tilting the Lens, our design practice is rooted in co-designing with communities that have historically been designed for. Our co-design and human-centered design framework means that Disabled people are central to the design process, allowing us to collectively improve and transform systems. Our focus is for design innovation to be multi-modal, to move beyond compliance, and to create the conditions for Disabled people to be successful.” - Sinéad Burke
Emerging Design Medal: Rio Kobayashi
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The Emerging Design Medal was presented to Rio Kobayashi by Jemma Read, Global Head of Corporate Philanthropy at Bloomberg. It recognises an individual or practice that has made a recent impact on the design scene and has an emerging practice showing design promise.
Rio Kobayashi is a London-based designer and maker. Born in Japan into a multicultural family of artisans, he trained as a furniture maker in Austria before apprenticing with workshops across Europe. In 2017, he established his East London studio, where he creates furniture, interiors, and sculptural objects shaped by material, form, and narrative. Rooted in craft traditions and shaped by contemporary influences, his pieces often carry subtle colour and detail. Over the past decade, he has developed a refreshing body of work in a class by itself. Playful at heart, Kobayashi approaches fine craftsmanship with a crisp twist of humour. He experiments expansively with fabrication techniques based on solid knowledge in materials. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the London Design Festival, Milan Design Week, Design Miami, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Design Museum in London, and in galleries across Europe and the United States. Kobayashi has collaborated with global brands, and his practice has been widely featured in international publications. His work is held in both private collections and in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“I am truly honoured to receive this recognition from the design community, alongside inspirational figures who have forged new paths of creativity for the future.” - Rio Kobayashi
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