Lessons from the DAME Awards

The DAME Design Award celebrates everything that is important about marine equipment design, from aesthetics to functionality, integration to packaging and price efficiency to lifecycle management.

Overall and category recognition is annually provided at METSTRADE – the world’s largest trade exhibition for the international leisure marine industry – in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

What can the DAME Awards tell us about the pace and direction of marine equipment design and innovation? DAME Jury Secretary and former Chair Kim Hollamby analyses a snapshot of winning entries across two decades to see what they have to tell us about future trends:

The DAME Awards brings together a unique field of new products each year that are placed under very close scrutiny. The Jury looks at every detail of the design, not just innovation but also form, function, price to performance and increasingly of course, sustainability.

The judgement process is thought provoking at the individual product level and offers tangible signals about the leisure marine sector’s collective priorities and focus points.

What the Jury rarely has time to do is to cast an eye over the shoulder to look at where the industry has come from in terms of the characteristics and proposition of products that have been presented.

Much as you can discover the direction of a boat by looking at the trail of its wake, in this blog we’ll look at the overall winners and some category headliners in 2002, 2012, and 2022 to consider some notable emergent design changes over that timeframe. – Full report