Research agency Forensic Architecture has won the Design of the Year award for 2018, beating fashion designer Erdem Moralio?lu's Royal Ballet costumes and Space X's Falcon Heavy rocket.
Forensic Architecture won the Beazley Design of the Year award, organised by London's Design Museum, for its Counter Investigations exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) earlier this year.
The win caused Ian Callum, design director of Jaguar and one of the six judges, to declare that "the era of multi-discipline design has really has commenced".
Forensic Architecture's Counter Investigations exhibition at London's ICA won the Designs of the Year award
The research agency is based at Goldsmiths University in London, from where it uses a range of research techniques to expose miscarriages of justice by piecing together strands of evidence across various disciplines. Its work uses footage from news coverage, videos shot on smartphones, satellite images, as well as maps and fragments of other evidence are subject to architectural analysis. From these many strands of data, Forensic Architecture creates detailed 3D reconstructions, to identify a clear picture of events in cases where information is disputed.
The exhibition for which they won the award included investigations into a murder in Kassel, Germany by a member of a far-right group, and the failings of state agencies that contributed to the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean.
The research agency use multi...