SAIA Sustainable Design Award
Client: AfriSam
Period: 2009-2020
Sustainable development
Manufacturing & industrials
Multi-stakeholder partnerships
Design & architecture
Awards & events
01 — The sneak-peek
A decade of building a sustainable future
BBA Liminal established and stewarded South Africa's most prestigious sustainability award for over ten years — convening the awards, producing 40-plus documentaries, holding one demanding standard across architecture, research, technology and social programmes, and carrying it to the next generation of designers.
02 — The liminal moment
Sustainability is easily reduced to a tickbox — a rigid count of metrics that says little about whether anyone's life is better. As one adjudicator put it, the real question is qualitative: are lives being improved. An award that meant anything had to hold that richer definition steadily, year after year, across a field that kept trying to quantify its way out of it.
Since 2009, BBA Liminal has established and administered the SAIA Sustainable Design Award (formerly the AfriSam-SAIA Award for Sustainable Architecture + Innovation) for AfriSam and SAIA. The brief runs from conceptualising and managing the awards event to designing and producing all its communication. The deeper task is stewardship: keeping a credible, human definition of sustainability alive across professions, project types, and generations.
03 — The transformation
We told sustainable stories. Since 2009 we have produced more than forty short documentaries profiling the projects and the people behind them — a media library that makes sustainable excellence visible across craftsmanship, technology and social impact.
We held one bar across difference. For a decade we adjudicated wildly different work — buildings, research, products, social programmes — against a single demanding set of criteria: harmonisation, people upliftment, new ways of thinking, placemaking and leadership. We refused to let the categories drift into separate standards.
We invested in the next generation. We broadened the award's reach with an exhibition and schools learning plan at the Joburg Library, and in 2019 conceptualised and ran the inaugural AfriSam Student Design Challenge for students and candidate architects across the country.
04 — The craft
Celebrating projects that move us forward in our relationship to nature
A decade of award cycles, from 2011/2012 through 2019/2020, each one documented and adjudicated against the same criteria. Four categories — sustainable architecture, research, product and technology, and social programmes — and a growing video library that lets anyone explore the projects, the leaders and the ideas the award has recognised.
Four categories
Category A
Sustainable architecture
A sustainable new building or the conservation and restoration of an existing one.
Category B
Research in sustainability
Practice-based action and research work in the field of sustainability and the built environment.
Category C
Sustainable product/technology
A product or technology of social impact with an objective of changing lives.
Category D
Sustainable social programmes
A project of social impact in the field of sustainability and the living environment.
2019/2020 Award
2017/2018 Award
2015/2016 Award
2013/2014 Award
2011/2012 Award
05 — The validation of purpose
The award has held its purpose for more than a decade — over sixty projects awarded and commended since 2009, a documentary archive of South African sustainability, and a definition that asks of every entry whether lives are actually improved. By stewarding the same standard across cycles and carrying it to students, the programme has kept sustainability a human question rather than a compliance one.
"Sustainability is a human issue. We need to move away from merely quantifying sustainability through rigid tickbox exercises to qualifying sustainability. Are lives being improved qualitatively?"
— Dr Philippa Tumubweinee, adjudicator and Head of School at Architecture, Planning & Geomatics, University of Cape Town
10+ years stewarded
60+ projects awarded & commended
40+ documentaries produced
Brand & communications strategy
Sector publishing
Thought leadership
Facilitation & convening
Capacity building
Research & synthesis
Print production
Exhibition curation
Audiovisual & motion
Copywriting
Campaign design
Digital strategy
Event & convening design
Brand identity design
Public value framing
Long-term stewardship
Stakeholder strategy
Brand platform development
Positioning & narrative
