Danes have designs on awards

It sounds like a bid by the Danes to steal some thunder from their Swedish neighbors. After centuries of quarreling between the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Swedes came up with the Nobel Prize around 1900, and they’ve since hogged a lot of the cultural limelight.

But Kigge Hvid, director of the Index: Award, says the prize, given every four years, will be more “like the Oscars or the Cannes Film Festival. But design-based.”

Index:, a collaboration between the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs and a host of Danish foundations and corporations, aims to honor the best in socially conscious design.

Hvid says aesthetics are important -- Danish design may be best known because of the nation’s austerely chic midcentury furniture -- but organizers are looking for something more altruistic.

“We believe that the biggest objective for the 21st century,” Hvid said by phone from Copenhagen, “is for companies, states and societies to improve lives for people. And we believe design can do that.

“I know that sounds a little holy,” she added. “I’m sorry if I sound hippie-ish.”

An un-hippie-ish sum awaits the winners: 500,000 euros, or about $650,000, to be awarded in the Danish Parliament on Sept. 23. The top nominees will be exhibited in a Copenhagen art show.

The Index: folks are considering nearly 550 submissions, including a design to improve Singapore’s water supply and a plan to turn factory roofs into recreation centers. (Entries are no longer being accepted.)

Hvid and her colleagues visited Art Center College of Design a few weeks back to present their plans to campus brass, and Art Center students are heading to Denmark to design and produce the exhibitions.

Richard Koshalek, the Pasadena college’s president, says the world is on the verge of a design revolution that will go beyond glamour and style.

“Design has been operating at a very narrow bandwidth” that has largely been about helping consumer products compete, he says. “Index: is about expanding the range, going way beyond that.”

For more information, go to www.index2005.dk/.