Industrial designer Jo Barnard has been honored with the prestigious Bentley Lighthouse Award 2025 during the Dezeen Awards ceremony held in London. The award recognizes designers who demonstrate curiosity and courage in their work while creating beneficial impacts on social and environmental sustainability, inclusivity, or community empowerment.
Barnard serves as the founder of Morrama, a London-based design agency that specializes in user-focused design with a strong emphasis on environmental responsibility. The master jury particularly praised Barnard's top-down approach to driving sustainable change in the design industry. According to the jury, "Sustainability has to be driven by brands, and [Jo] Barnard challenges her clients to do exactly that."
The jury highlighted Barnard's exceptional commitment to accessibility and her remarkable ability to bring complex topics like circularity into mainstream conversations. "She advocates for circularity, and her work shifts this issue towards the mainstream by creating tangible designs such as refillable products and making them accessible," the jury noted. They further emphasized that "Together with her team at Morrama, she is putting sustainable choices into the hands of everyday users by shifting consumer mindset through design."
Earlier this year, Barnard contributed an opinion piece to Dezeen arguing for the need to simplify our understanding of "regenerative design" to apply the concept more meaningfully. In her view, this can be achieved at the product level, where designers "can go beyond designing for repair, reuse and disassembly and seek to shift the idea of consumerism to custodianship."
Morrama's latest project, the Kibu children's headphones, exemplifies this philosophy and has garnered significant recognition. The product won the Dezeen Awards 2025 sustainable project of the year and received high commendation for product design in the consumer design category. The headphones are built on the premise of putting circularity at the forefront of consumer mindsets, designed as a made-to-order product that requires assembly before use.
The studio's portfolio includes other notable recent projects such as redesigned packaging for the toiletries brand Kankan and an innovative menopause-treatment concept that utilizes artificial intelligence to customize pills based on individual users' symptoms. These projects demonstrate Morrama's consistent commitment to combining sustainability with practical user-centered design solutions.
Beyond her commercial work, Barnard co-founded Design Declares, a not-for-profit initiative aimed at mobilizing the design industry to take collective climate action. She has also authored "The Sustainable Design Handbook" and serves as an associate lecturer at the prestigious Royal College of Art, sharing her expertise with the next generation of designers.
The competition for the Bentley Lighthouse Award was highly competitive this year. The shortlisted nominees alongside Barnard included designers Henriëtte Waal, Jessie French, Nichole Rouillac, and EcoLogic Studio co-founders Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto. Previous winners of this distinguished award include Fernando Laposse in 2024 and Bonnie Hvillum, who was the inaugural winner in 2023.
The Dezeen Awards 2025 program operates in partnership with Bentley as part of a broader collaboration to inspire, support, and champion design excellence while showcasing innovation that creates a better and more sustainable world. This partnership aligns with Bentley's architecture and design business initiatives, including the Bentley Home range of furnishings and real estate projects worldwide, demonstrating the luxury brand's commitment to supporting outstanding design across multiple sectors.
