By Bonnie Alter / Source: TreeHugger

London’s Design Museum holds an annual competition to chose the best designs of the year. The nominees are drawn from all over the world and range from socially responsible to quirky.

There are 6 different categories and a winner is chosen from each of fashion, transport, graphics, architecture, product and digital. Then an over-all winner is chosen from this group.

The over-all winner this year: Microchips lined with human cells.

In the Product category, Organs-on-Chips was the big winner of the Design of the Year. It’s the first time in eight years that a design from the field of medicine has won.

The “chips” can be used to study how drugs affect different organs and are metabolised around the body so that testing drugs and treatments can be more effective.

The judges said “with drug development costs running in to billions of pounds…it’s an intriguing and exciting prospect that has the potential to reduce animal testing, and at the same time speed up development of new drugs.”

As another judge explained: ‘A really big idea, it incorporates technology and design to eliminate the problem of having to use animals to test a product. It feels like one of those questions of the future.’

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