Irish Design Excellence Award 2026 Shortlist Puts a Sewage Plant Beside a Space Film

The Irish Design Excellence Award 2026 shortlist puts a sewage plant, a satellite film, a housing-crisis video game and a racehorse sensor in the same race for Ireland's new national design prize. The winners are announced in Kilkenny on 7 November.

A wastewater treatment plant, a video game about the housing crisis, a short film made to launch Ireland’s first satellite, and a wearable sensor for racehorses walk into the same award. That is not a setup for a joke. It is the Irish Design Excellence Award 2026 shortlist, the first edition of a national prize run by Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) with the National Museum of Ireland, and its sheer range is the point (DCCI).

The winners will be announced on Saturday 7 November at the National Design & Craft Gallery in Kilkenny, where an exhibition of the nominated projects opens the same day and runs until 23 January 2027. One project takes the IDEA Jury Prize, worth €15,000. A second honour, the IDEA National Collection Acquisition, gives the National Museum of Ireland a purchase fund of up to €10,000 to buy contemporary design into the national collection (DCCI). District Magazine notes the question built into that second prize: the award asks what designs will matter in 50 years, and for the first time the museum can acquire contemporary Irish design pieces to preserve as heritage (District Magazine).

An Irish Design Excellence Award 2026 shortlist that refuses to stay in one discipline

None of these projects applied in the ordinary way. Each was nominated by a leading Irish design organisation — the Irish Architecture Foundation and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) put forward the architecture entries, while interaction designers, illustrators, animators, games developers and immersive-media bodies nominated in their own fields (DCCI).

The resulting list is gloriously uneven. Retirement Plan, directed by John Kelly, is an Oscar-nominated short film. All Ways Home, an illustrated film by Alan Dunne, was released to mark the launch of EIRSAT-1, Ireland’s first space mission. Mega Dreoilín, a video game by Namaco, holds a mirror up to the housing crisis. The Intelligence Garden is an immersive digital installation first shown at Outernet in London. Eileen McNulty’s Tapestry of Ireland renders everyday Irish life in textile form, and the S-PRO platform from EquiMetrics and Frontend.com feeds racehorse trainers data on performance, fitness and recovery. A selection of poems by the artist and filmmaker Paul Yates completes a list that treats “design” as something closer to a national habit than a trade category (DCCI).

Mary Blanchfield, CEO of Design & Crafts Council Ireland, said the standard of submissions for the inaugural award was “exceptional, setting the bar remarkably high.” Dónal Maguire, Keeper of the Art and Industrial Division at the National Museum of Ireland, said the museum’s IDEA acquisitions “will grow the national collection as a broader expression of human creativity and as source of inspiration to future designers” (DCCI).

Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant architecture, taken seriously

The heavyweight entry — literally — is the Arklow Wastewater Treatment Plant in County Wicklow, designed by Clancy Moore Architects and nominated by the RIAI. For decades Arklow discharged raw sewage straight into the Avoca River. The new plant ended that: it replaces 19 historic outfalls, serves a population of 24,000 with capacity to expand to 36,000, and was delivered six months ahead of schedule and on budget (Irish Construction News).

What sets it apart from ordinary infrastructure is that somebody designed it to be looked at. Its mint-green structures carry bat-friendly louvres, an on-site solar farm handles part of its energy, and the scheme has already won International Project of the Year at the British Construction & Infrastructure Awards 2025 and the Architectural Association of Ireland’s Downes Medal, its highest honour (Irish Construction News; Eolas Magazine). Uisce Éireann, the state water utility behind the project, describes Arklow as the milestone in a national programme that has now eliminated over 85 per cent of raw sewage discharges by volume since 2014 (Eolas Magazine).

Analysis: Placing that plant on the same shortlist as a satellite film and a tapestry does something useful. It argues, in public, that the design of a sewage works is a cultural act — that a town’s riverfront deserves the same care as its gallery wall. Whether the jury agrees will be known on 7 November.

Irish Design Week 2026 frames the prize

The award lands inside Irish Design Week 2026, the festival’s fifth edition, running nationwide from 7 to 14 November under the theme Fáilte Future Europe, tied to Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The programme ranges from a Design of Craft conference in Dublin to sessions on Ireland’s design history “from Arts and Crafts to AI,” plus the European Creative Industries Summit on 12 November (DCCI; District Magazine).

The IDEA exhibition at the National Design & Craft Gallery in Kilkenny is free to visit. Information verified through 3 November 2026.

Photo: Lisa Harding, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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