The 1851 Royal Commission and the Sir Misha Black Awards Committee have announced the recipients of the 2025 Sir Misha Black Awards for Design Education, celebrating outstanding contributions to innovation, leadership and lifelong impact in the field.
The Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education were awarded to Professor William Ion (pictured above, centre) and Lady Helen Hamlyn (pictured above, at right), in recognition of their exceptional influence on design learning, research and social innovation.
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The Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education was presented to Victoria Thornton (pictured above, at left) and the Thornton Education Trust for their pioneering work engaging young people with architecture and the built environment.
For more than 35 years, Professor William Ion has shaped design education in the UK and internationally, establishing product design engineering as a discipline that unites engineering design, industrial design and manufacturing.
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Early in his career, he co-developed and taught the groundbreaking Total Design course at the University of Strathclyde (1986–91) with Professor Stuart Pugh, attracting more than 300 students weekly from across engineering disciplines and setting new standards for interdisciplinary collaboration.
He went on to found the MEng Product Design Engineering programme in 1991, which remains the flagship course of Strathclyde’s Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management. Professor Ion also played a key role in the Sharing Experience in Engineering Design network and the establishment of the Design Education Special Interest Group within the Design Society, co-founding the influential E&PDE Conference, now a global annual event.
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Beyond education, he has been central to manufacturing innovation as founding director of the Advanced Forming Research Centre and part of the team that established the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland and the establishment of its Manufacturing Skills Academy, with a focus on lifelong learning.
For more than four decades, Lady Helen Hamlyn has redefined design education through a visionary combination of creativity, collaboration and social purpose.
Her journey began with the New Design for Old exhibition at the V&A in 1986, reframing ageing as a design challenge. She later founded DesignAge at the Royal College of Art, which evolved into the internationally acclaimed Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design – a pioneer in inclusive and human-centred design affecting design practice, policy, industry, healthcare and design education.
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Lady Hamlyn’s impact extends beyond traditional design education. As a designer, she has brought design thinking into health, culture and community development. Among her major initiatives are the endowment of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London (2008), which brings together engineers, clinicians and computer scientists at the forefront of research in surgical robotics, founding Open Futures (2003), an award-winning learning programme for children in deprived areas that introduced new contexts for learning and supported schools to design a more holistic and expansive curriculum. International projects in India, Portugal and the USA combine education, sustainability and cultural preservation and demonstrate her belief that when communities are supported to design their own solutions, the results can be truly transformative.
The 2025 Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education recognised Victoria Thornton and the Thornton Education Trust (TET) for transforming how young people engage with architecture, sustainability and civic design.
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Building on her legacy as founder of Open House/Open City, Thornton created TET in 2020 to empower the next generation to shape the environments they will inherit. TET’s programmes, including the Inspire Future Generation Awards and its Knowledge Hub, connect educators, policymakers and design professionals to share best practice and give young people a meaningful voice in the built environment. TET has also recently launched the Imagine Built Environment Education programme, a new initiative designed to bring architecture and the built environment into primary schools across the UK.
Thornton’s distinguished career includes leadership roles with the Architectural Association, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal Jury and national design initiatives such as the Farrell Review. Her work has been recognised with an OBE for services to architecture and education, an honorary RIBA fellowship and an honorary MA from London Metropolitan University.