Seesaws alongside the border between the USA and Mexico have been chosen because the Design Museum's best choice for 2020
The 2020 Design Museum's Beazley Designs winner is Teeter-Totter Wall, a project staged by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello and the art collective Colectivo Chopeke.
The temporary interactive installation featured three pink seesaws on the heavily politicized border between the United States and Mexico, where children from El Paso, Texas and the Anapra community in Juarez, Mexico could play with each other. The aim was to illustrate how actions on one side of a border affect the other, and to bring two communities together as neighbors.
The US-Mexico border has been the subject of intense political debate and tension, particularly under the Trump administration. Due to the “sensitive context at the border”, the realization of the Teeter-Totter wall took ten years.
The project included the installation of the pink rockers by designers from both sides of the border that only stayed in place for less than 20 minutes, although the project went viral online on social media and in the press.
About the winning project, the Director and General Manager of the Design Museum, Tim Marlow, said: “It has promoted new ways of connecting people and struck a chord that goes well beyond El Paso in the US and Juarez in Mexico. It remains an inventive and poignant reminder of how people can overcome the forces that want to divide us. "
Other category winners include Telfar's coveted vegan, gender-neutral bags; ModSkool's portable school was developed in response to evictions from communities in the floodplains of the Yamuna River in India. and an early 3D rendering of the virus that changed the world: SARS-CoV-2, also known as Covid-19.
Category winners:
Architecture: ModSkool by Social Design Collaborative
Digital: A rapist in your own way (“Un violador en tu camino”) by Colectivo Lastesis
Fashion: Telfar bag by Telfar
Graphics: 3D rendering of SARS-CoV-2 by Alissa Eckert (MSMI) and Dan Higgins (MAMS)
Product: Impossible Burger 2.0 from Impossible Foods
Transport: Teeter-Totter Wall by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke
Popular election: brick arches from Hong Kong protesters