Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Shedworking awards 2011

For literally the second time ever, we're presenting the annual Shedworking Awards. It's been another fine 12 months for shedlike microarchitecture and many thanks to everybody who's visited the site, commented and who replied to our Readers' Award call for votes on Twitter. So here we go with the first envelope...

Best design - There were some extraordinary designs this year from the very unboxlike Tetra Shed to Google's marvellous indoor shedworking facilities in London. We also particularly liked Office Sian's awardwinning Hackney Shed and the historic medieval garden office. But the winner this year is the ecofriendly garden office in Nigel Nunnett's RBC Wild Garden at Chelsea Flower Show: built from a recycled shipping container and with a lovely green roof plus habitat walls, it was a perfect example of how shedworking can be beautiful and functional.

Best blog/web site - As always, Lloyd Alter at Treehugger and Kent Griswold at Tiny House Blog brought intelligent writing and intriguing tiny architecture to a wider audience. The winner though was Christian 'Documentally' Payne who devoted an entire blog - DocuDen - to his new garden office and as you'd expect from one of the UK's leading social technologists, used all sorts of material to make it a rich experience to visit.

Best Tweeter – We saw a lot more shedworkers tweeting about and from their garden office space but none did it with the panache of writer Joanne Harris (@joannechocolat) who presented us with an almost daily dose of shed-based thoughts.

Best popularisation of shedworkingUnbound is a groundbreaking publishing project which relies on crowdsourced funding. It was launched at the Hay Festival in the summer (with a little help from Shedworking) in a 3rdSpace Garden Room designed and built on site by Sawhorse. Not only does the Unbound web site use shed imagery heavily, but the festival presence brought the concept of shedworking to tens of thousands of visitors.

Readers' Award - Some of you were kind enough to nominate the charity ebook The Happy Shedworker in this category, launched earlier in the year to raise money for Shelter. But by some distance, the winner was the Irish Men’s Sheds Association’s which launched with a bang and looks set to build on that early success, bringing the idea of shedworking to a wider audience around the country.

Lifetime achievement award – Brighton-based John 'Shedman' Davies has been writing poetry about sheds and using sheds in his festival visits and workshops since well before Shedworking was established. Not only is he a talented writer and communicator, using sheds in the most creative way possible, but he's a delightful and thoughtful chap too.
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