2013 Designs of the Year award: who will win? Since it opened in 1989, the Design Museum has taken on the role once played by the Design Council and its Haymarket showroom. But, unlike its state-owned predecessor, the Design Museum has no special remit to promote British design because the global economy, and new forms of global communication, have changed the way we produce, consume, think about and experience new fashion, furniture, architecture and digital design. So, it is to the Design Museum that we will turn this month and next to discover what might, or might not, be the world's best new designs. The museum will present 99 contenders for its Designs of the Year Award. Last year, the prize went to the Olympic Torch designed by Thomas Heatherwick, whose Olympic Cauldron is a contender this year. Nominated designs are grouped into seven categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product and Transport. The range and variety is eye-boggling and, although it would be satisfying to report that it is possible to detect a definite trend in global design, in fact, these 99 designs add up to an uncategorisable cornucopia of ideas, forms, colours, materials and styles. Good luck to the judges. How can they weigh Renzo Piano's Shard in the balance with Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, or Heatherwick's Olympic Cauldron with a pair of brightly coloured spectacles by Joshua Silver, a retired Oxford University physics professor, for the Centre for Vision in the Developing World? These glasses were conceived for children without access to opticians; the wearers can adjust them on their own while making themselves look like exceptionally young with-it designers. In the pre-global, pre-digital era when the Design Council was young and there was such a thing as society - pace Mrs Thatcher - design was meant to be good for us in a hearty, wholemeal, Gill Sans-clear way. Today, it has become a far richer, more entertaining affair. Designs of the Year 2013 is at the Design Museum, London SE1, from March 20 to July 7. Details: designmuseum.org