London- and Cornwall-based designer Lulu Harrison is the winner of the 2025 Ralph Saltzman Prize, the Design Museum’s annual accolade celebrating emerging designers. Harrison will also receive a £10,000 bursary to support her work, along with a solo exhibition at the Design Museum running from 24 June to 25 August 2025.
Lulu Harrison: 2025 Ralph Saltzman Prize winner
Lulu Harrison creating seaweed ash for glassmaking on the Northumberland coast
The award was established in 2022, with British designer Mac Collins as the inaugural winner, followed by Marco Campardo (2023) and Attua Aparicio (2024). It was created by Lisa Saltzman, as a legacy to her father, Ralph Saltzman, co-founder and chairman of Designtex, the leading company in the design and manufacturing of applied materials for the built environment.
This annual award celebrates designers that are innovating around material use and manufacture and who have set up their own practice in the past five years. It is a way to offer emerging talents an opportunity to expand their work, through a financial contribution and exposure.
‘I created the Ralph Saltzman Prize four years ago to honour my father, who was an innovator and a pioneer. He was truly passionate about design and believed that great design could improve our lives. This prize is his legacy,’ says Saltzman. ‘I hope he would have liked Lulu Harrison’s originality, left-of-field thinking, experimentation with working with an everyday material and, mostly, her commitment to sustainability. Her passion and commitment to her craft very much reminds me of my father.’
Harrison is the fourth recipient of the prize. Her submission is ‘Thames Glass’, a project inspired by the idea of creating geo-specific glass using local, abundant and waste materials from one location or region. As a geo alchemist glass artist, Harrison has always been drawn to working with natural materials including river sands, wood ashes, and waste quagga mussel shells from rivers, especially having grown up by the River Thames in Oxfordshire.
Harrison’s work was selected by a jury made up of industrial designer, Konstantin Grcic, author Seetal Solanki, designer Stephen Burks and editor and presenter Michelle Ogundehin. The jury said, ‘Harrison’s methodology for developing “Thames Glass” is incredible. She’s a great researcher and communicator, both in terms of mapping the raw materials that go into making the glass and visualising it for an audience to make it easy to understand. We were really blown away by the quality of her work.’
Harrison’s studio is currently based in Falmouth in Cornwall. From here she travels across the country and worldwide, working alongside glass chemists, glass blowers, and glass studios to inspire her research. ‘Thames Glass’ highlights circular glass production by integrating modern-day waste materials and applying it to glassmaking.
Lulu Harrison's work will be on display at the Design Museum running from 24 June to 25 August 2025 designmuseum.org
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