The Design Week Awards

Back in December last year Cogapp was honoured with a Design Week award nomination for our work on MoMA.guide. The awards ceremony took place last week and we were delighted to welcome along Allegra Burnette from MoMA and Matthew Cock from the British Museum.

I spoke to Cogapp’s Design Director Colin Jenkinson about his experience of the awards.

We entered MoMA.guide which is a project that launches this month for the Museum of Modern Art. It’s an interactive public access kiosk system that guides visitors in their experience of MoMA. We entered it in the Digital Design Information category and we were shortlisted. I think, in the whole of the Design Week Awards there were 20 categories. Of which, there were only 2 core digital categories, Digital Design Commercial and ours.

One of the interesting things for us was entering the Digital Design Information category but not knowing who we were nominated with. When the nominees were revealed, we discovered that we were up against the Apple iPhone. So, obviously, we didn’t win but on a plus point we lost to the best in show! It’s nice to be in that field as a positive profile for Cogapp and I think there’s a general understanding that perhaps we wouldn’t win against such a high level device with such popularity.

Colin’s highlights:

The iPhone, which is winning every award out there at the moment for product design, interface design, packaging, you name it.

The Science Museum was really strong. They were entered into the hall of fame actually, which was great. And I think that was really interesting in terms of the projects they’re doing with interactive media as well.

The Natural History Museum - this was great! It’s educational packs for the Natural History Museum which are fantastic actually, they’re kinda’ little masks which you can look through and it’s just quite playful to see the Natural History Museum brand being used in this way. I’d love to see this happening on the web a lot more because there’s some really exciting stuff happening in print.