Investigation into Amazon Echo devices wins 2019 Beazley Design of the Year award

“Anatomy of an AI System” – a project that explores the social and environmental impact of Amazon’s Echo devices running the Alexa voice assistant – has won the 2019 Beazley Design of the Year.

The award and accompanying exhibition is held each year at London’s Design Museum to showcase original and innovative new designs in various fields.

The all-digital winning investigation, created by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, looks at the amount of human labor, data and resources required to support the lifespan of a single Echo product, visually illustrating the real-world impact of voice assistants.

“It shows how many people and how much energy goes into producing artificial intelligence,” said curator Beatrice Galilee in a phone interview. “These things that simplify our lives and require less effort on our part, take up a spectacular amount of effort to generate, involving multiple continents, mining of various minerals, all of the labor, all of the tech, all of the updates – this project is showing the rest of the iceberg on that.”

The project, whose findings include the disparity in wages between an industry CEO and a child miner, asks a difficult question: is the convenience offered by these devices worth their human and environmental cost?

“AI is such a prevailing feature of the future of technology it seemed the perfect moment to analyze its impact, which this project does,” Paul Thompson, Chairman of the 2019 judges, said in a statement.

“In the future, when you purchase a piece of digital hardware it could have the ingredients listed. This project shows how this might look and makes everyone who sees it think about all the unseen impact of tech hardware. You will never look at your smart home hub the same way again.”

Category winners

More winners were picked from six award categories: products, transport, graphics, fashion, digital and architecture. Anatomy of an AI System also won the category award for Digital, as well as the top title.

The Maya Somaiya school library in Kopargaon, India, took home the architecture award. A complex series of arches and double curvatures take their cue from Catalan vaulting techniques, while the brick rooms and walls transform the roof into a usable landscape, allowing children to walk and play on top of the library itself.

The fashion award went to a capsule collection of Adidas Originals by Ji Won Choi, which draws inspiration from the designer’s Korean roots and, in particular, traditional Korean dress.

The graphic category went to the architectural branding, environmental graphics and signage for the new Seoul headquarters of beauty and cosmetics company Amorepacific, designed by Sascha Lobe at Pentagram with L2M3.

Best product was awarded to the Catch HIV detector. It is a low-cost and user-friendly self-test device by British product designer Hans Ramzan, targeted at emerging countries where easy access to healthcare isn’t always available.

Courtesy Design Museum

The Design Museum has announced the 76 nominees for the 2019 Beazley Design Award. Beatrice Galilee, this year's guest curator, selects her favorite picks from the shortlist for CNN Style, starting with The Shed, New York's new event space that can expand and contract, designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Courtesy Design Museum

Jump, an electric bicycle, is part of Uber's new fleet for urban mobility. "The relationship between our phones and our cities has transformed with Uber, which is now moving into this more environmentally friendly offerings," said curator Beatrice Galilee.

Courtesy Design Museum

Muji's Gacha is a self-driving shuttle bus that works in all weather conditions, and has no defined front and back. Now undergoing testing, it will be rolled out as early as 2020.

Courtesy Design Museum

Q is the world's first gender-neutral voice, which is designed to eliminate gender bias from technologies such as digital assistants. It's created by combining the voices of five people that do not identify as either female or male.

Courtesy Design Museum

"One of the most talked about catwalk shows this year was Viktor and Rolf's. They did these dresses that were absolutely huge with these statements on them. They were very Instagrammable, but also touched upon women's voices and women occupying more space," said curator Beatrice Galilee.

Courtesy Design Museum

The CanguRo (Italian for "kangaroo") mobility robot, designed in Japan, is an autonomous assistant for the elderly that transforms into a mobility vehicle.

Courtesy Design Museum

The brand identity for the Wolverhampton Wanderers, an English football team, was influenced by the region's ties with steel and ironmongering, so the logo contains a 3D wolf head made of iron.

Courtesy Design Museum

Opalis, an online directory for reusable building materials, allows architects and owners to deal with construction works in an environmentally conscious way.

Courtesy Design Museum

"It's really amazing to see these close up, because you sort of forget how graphic the film is -- but the costumes have nothing to do with that era. When you look at the patterns, you realize it's actually a really contemporary look."

Courtesy Design Museum

An inner-city skateboarding park and cafe built out of a derelict courtyard in Athens, Greece, with the help of social entrepreneurship.

Courtesy Design Museum

Led By Donkeys was a billboard campaign targeting Brexit in the UK. "Probably more than anything this year, in British design, politics and campaigning has been just so much on the forefront. I think we forget that our lives didn't use to be dominated by this sort of binary positions, for and against one topic."

Courtesy Design Museum

This classic opera adaptation by Yuval Sharon was staged by the State Opera in Berlin, where it was the first new production in 25 years.

Courtesy Design Museum

This raw concrete mosque in Sydney was designed to reunite a previously disparate religious community. "This is an incredibly sensitive, beautiful, contemporary mosque design," said Galilee.

Courtesy Design Museum

Promoted by Transport for London (TfL), this is a new rating system for heavy vehicles to improve road safety, especially cyclists who end up in a truck's 'blind spot.'

Courtesy Design Museum

These placards were used during the strikes inspired by climate activist Greta Thunberg, which have seen the participation of 1.4 million students in 112 countries.

The transport winner was Gacha, a self-driving shuttle bus concept co-designed by Japanese retail giant MUJI and Sensible 4, a Finnish autonomous driving company.

Last year, “Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture,” an exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts took home the main prize. In 2017, architect David Adjaye emerged as the winner for his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, out of a politically charged shortlist. In 2016, the award went to an emergency refugee shelter designed by Ikea.

Beazley Designs of the Year is on display at London’s Design Museum until Feb. 9, 2020.