What is the Curry Stone Design Prize?

The Curry Stone Design Prize is an annual award to exceptional designers at the experimental point in their careers. It recognizes extraordinary design projects or innovative ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to reward and support new design projects and/or ideas that contribute positively toward global, societal, and/or humanitarian conditions and represent innovative thinking.

Selection will be based on a pool of nominees submitted by a group of nominators from around the world. Unsolicited proposals are not accepted. The group of nominators consists of individuals who are leaders in contemporary design discourse today, along with key individuals from other disciplines with a sense of global vision. The nominators serve anonymously. The composition of the group will change regularly under the direction of the Curry Stone Chair in Design. A Selection Jury will be named each year to review the nominations and to choose the recipient of the Curry Stone Design Prize. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to identify and recognize exceptional designers based on the merit of their ideas and the potential for bringing their ideas to fruition.

The Curry Stone Design Prize will reward design innovation in its broadest terms, in traditional fields of architectural design, urban design, product design, landscape design, graphic design, and industrial design, among others, and also in non-traditional interpretations of design. In some ways, the award may shape the definition of design practice and application itself.

Design has always been concerned with the built environment and the place of people within it, but too often has limited its effective reach to narrow segments of society. The Curry Stone Design Prize is intended to support the expansion of the reach of designers to a wide segment of humanity around the globe and to make the talents of leading designers available to the broadest sections of society. It is also intended to introduce design students of today to the power and tools of innovation. The College of Design will administer the Curry Stone Design Prize, with a faculty member serving as the Curry Stone Chair in Design and as Prize Secretary. It is anticipated that its faculty and students will have access to and engagement with the members of the prize network, coordinated individually through the Curry Stone Chair in Design.

There are notable precedents for universities administering national or international awards: for example, the Pulitzer Prize (Journalism) are administered by Columbia University; the Peabody Awards (Electronic Media) are run by the University of Georgia; the Grawemeyer Award (Improving World Order) is presented by the University of Louisville. The Curry Stone Design Prize at the University of Kentucky will become the focal point for a new research area and graduate degree devoted to social entrepreneuralism. The curriculum will focus on the ways innovative design adds economic as well as social value to small communities and large metropolitan areas alike. We believe this program will be among the first of its kind in America.

The Curry Stone Design Prize will be awarded annually at the Idea Festival www.ideafestival.com in Louisville. The Curry Stone Design Prize recipients will have multiple opportunities to visit Kentucky and to engage with many people from all backgrounds, from the academic world to civic leaders to the public at large. We anticipate that some of the nominees will bring research and design applications to Kentucky that they have pioneered in other parts of the world.

The Curry Stone Design Prize and the Curry Stone Chair in Design are named for the Curry Stone Foundation, which was founded by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife, H. Delight Stone. Curry is a 1970 alumnus of the then UK College of Architecture (now the UK College of Design). He has been active in the College of Design Visiting Committee and has funded numerous scholarships at the college. A community activist, Stone is a historical archaeologist working on her doctorate at the University of Leicester.

After earning his professional architecture license, Curry worked in community planning in Bloomington, Ind., and in Salem, Or. His professional career progressed as a principal architect for the retirement housing industry pioneer William Colson. Three hundred senior-living communities have been built by Colson and partners across the U.S., Canada and England. In 2007 this group of retirement housing complexes sold. This sale allowed for the initial funding of the Curry Stone Foundation. Curry continues his practice through Curry Architecture designing retirement housing.