BIO23 winners

Studio Swine and Kieren Jones' Sea Chair won the Gold Medal and Green award at the 23rd Ljubljana Biennial of Design: other winners included diverse projects that are paradigm-changing in their own way.

The 23rd Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has awarded its Gold Medal to Studio Swine and Kieren Jones' Sea Chair, designed with co-authors Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves. The stool, which also won the event's Green Award, is created entirely from plastic recovered from the ocean. Together, Studio Swine and Kieren Jones have created devices to collect and process marine debris into a series of stools.

Curated by Margo Konings and Margriet Vollenberg (Organisation in Design), the BIO 23 main exhibition gathers a selection of works from 27 countries in Ljubljana's Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), seeking to illustrate how modern technologies, digitalisation, globalisation, as well as nature and its resources, influence designers and their creative work. Awarded projects were selected from the Biennial's main exhibition.

The jury, composed of Giulio Cappellini, Sven Jonke, Sophie Lovell, Jimmy MacDonald and Vasa J. Perovic, remarked how the project "considers life-cycles, systems, industrial and social factors in a local, global and product context, as well as addressing one of the biggest pollution problems of our age," expressing a wish to see this project implemented in the future.

The jury further sought "to honour a design typology that is beyond the generally accepted understanding of industrial design," by awarding three special mentions to Nikola Ðurek (Typonine) and Marija Juza (Babushke)'s Balkan type system, Nitipak Samsen's Trail$ smart banknote system and Tuur van Balen's DNA Hacking Yoghurt.

Student awards were given to Jólan van der Wiel's Gravity Stool; Max Böhme's Wooden coats; Karin von Ompteda's Visualising Typographic Diversity posters; and Irena Rojs' (Un)Useful clothes collection.

The jury further distributed nine honourable mentions, to Rick Tegelaar's MeshMatics lamps; Adital Ela's Terra stools; Sabrina Koning-Woud, SKW Vormgeving Navigating in the Biesbosch buoys; Feodor Mayow's Grasshopper lamp; Susana Soares' Bee's diagnostic tool; Lucy McRae's Swallowable Parfum; Anagram Architects' The Ring (T)Rail urban renewal project; Studio Pepe Heykoop's Matka – Vases of skin collection; and Studio Jo Meesters' Particles series of vessels.