Monocle’s latest issue sets out the benchmarks (and benches) for a better world as we put the 50 recipients of this year’s Monocle Design Awards in the spo…
Illustrator
Satoshi Hashimoto
What is good design? A few months ago we asked our senior editor Nolan Giles to start speaking to our correspondents, contacts and editors about everything from the best examples of new urbanism to pieces of perfectly executed product design that they had seen and experienced. The ambition was simple: the inaugural Monocle Design Awards. Now, Mr Giles could quite rightly have fallen off his chair – although it’s hard to fall off a handsome and, yes, well-designed Maruni chair – because it’s a topic everyone has strong views on. Especially now.
In the past year we’ve seen some of the ugliest sticking- plaster designs take over our streets, homes and offices. Expediency, the need to enforce physical distancing and efforts to encourage people to get on their bicycles have all prompted a rash of quick-fix designs that will hopefully fade along with the pandemic. Here in London we have a new world of cheap cycling-lane bollards, warning signs pla