Jo Barnard wins Bentley Lighthouse Award 2025
Industrial designer Jo Barnard has been named the winner of the Bentley Lighthouse Award 2025 at this evening's Dezeen Awards ceremony in London.
The Bentley Lighthouse Award recognises designers who are curious and courageous in their approach and whose work has had a beneficial impact on social and environmental sustainability, inclusivity or community empowerment.
Barnard is the founder of London-based design agency Morrama, which focuses on user-focused design with a strong commitment to environmental responsibility.
The master jury noted Barnard's top-down approach to driving sustainable change. "Sustainability has to be driven by brands," they explained, "and [Jo] Barnard challenges her clients to do exactly that."
Pushing circularity into the mainstream
Moreover, the jury praised Barnard's commitment to accessibility and her ability to bring topics such as circularity into mainstream conversation.
"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."
"Together with her team at Morrama, she is putting sustainable choices into the hands of everyday users by shifting consumer mindset through design."
Writing an opinion piece earlier this year for Dezeen, Barnard argued that we must similarly simplify our understanding of "regenerative design" in order to start applying the concept meaningfully.
For Barnard, one way to achieve this is 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, Kibu children's headphones – winner of Dezeen Awards 2025 sustainable project of the year and highly commended for product design (consumer design) of the year – is built on this premise, as a made-to-order product that must be assembled before use.
The studio's other recent projects include redesigned packaging for the toiletries brand Kankan and a menopause-treatment concept that uses AI to customise pills based on users' symptoms.
Barnard is also the co-founder of Design Declares, a not-for-profit initiative mobilising the design industry to take collective climate action. She is the author of The Sustainable Design Handbook and teaches as an associate lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
The nominees shortlisted alongside Barnard for the Bentley Lighthouse Award included designers Henriëtte Waal, Jessie French, Nichole Rouillac and EcoLogic Studio co-founders Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto.
Previous winners of the Bentley Lighthouse Award include Fernando Laposse in 2024 and Bonnie Hvillum, the award's inaugural winner, in 2023.
Dezeen Awards 2025 in partnership with Bentley
Dezeen Awards is the ultimate accolade for architects and designers across the globe. The eighth edition of the annual awards programme is in partnership with Bentley as part of a wider collaboration to inspire, support and champion design excellence and showcase innovation that creates a better and more sustainable world. This ambition complements Bentley's architecture and design business initiatives, including the Bentley Home range of furnishings and real estate projects around the world.
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