The Beazley Designs awards are characterized by rewarding different art, design and activism proposals that occur around the world. Sponsored by Beazley, a business insurance agency, and run by The Design Museum, awards are given to different categories such as “Architecture”, “Digital”, “Fashion”, “Graphics”, “Products” and more, and among all winners, the winner of the “Beazley Design” award of the year is chosen.

In this 2020 edition of the Beazley Designs Awards, the overall winner was “Teeter-Totter Wall”, an installation that took place in 2019 on the border between Mexico and the United States. The authors of the project, architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, in collaboration with the Chopeke Collective of Ciudad Juárez, installed see-saws (or see-saws) across the wall so that citizens of both countries could swing together.

“What you do on one side (of the wall) has an impact on the other, and that is what the see-saw represents,” Rael said in an interview for CNN.

The point where it was installed was between the cities of Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, and due to the sensitive context in which the seesaws were located, the installation lasted a brief 20 minutes. However, photographs and videos of families and children playing with each other across the border were enough for the idea to go viral on social media.

Other winners

“Teeter-Tottter Wall” in addition to winning the Beazley Award, was the winner of the “Transportation” category; Among the other winning projects in the other categories are:

• “ModSkool” in the Architecture category, which consists of a “transportable” school, which responds to the need to educate farming communities in India that are constantly displaced.
  
• “Impossible Foods” in the Products category, for developing laboratory-produced hamburger meat, free of animal cruelty.
  
• “A rapist in your path” in the Digital category, the video-performance of the Lasthesis feminist collective from Chile whose song was used in different feminist marches in Latin America.
  

With information from CNN and Design Museum.