It may not look like it, but everything has been designed. From landscape to food packaging, from houses to roads – unless you live in the desert, everything is design. Consequently, an award for design is a pretty vague remit. Undeterred, the Design Museum has launched the Brit Insurance Design Awards, which replace the UK Designer of the Year Awards, a rather unsatisfactory affair that somehow, given the sheer scope of design, managed one year to award the prize to Hilary Cottam, who wasn’t a designer.

The new prize has brought a diffuse focus, if that is not an oxymoron, by splitting the 100-strong shortlist into seven categories embracing everything from architecture to fashion. The seven category winners – finalists for the overall prize – were announced yesterday.

It is a strong field. At its head, surely favourite, is the Beijing Olympic Stadium, an intricate, seductively beautiful spaghetti of structure forming itself into a staggeringly complex tangled form. The Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron, currently hard at work on the second phase of their Tate Modern, have proved the most consistently engaging, challenging and intelligent of designers, and would surely be a shoo-in, but for some other extremely worthy candidates.

Worthiest of all has to be One Laptop Per Child, a wonderful MIT programme to provide children in developing countries with a specially designed computer. Green in every way, the laptop – which is designed by Yves Béhar and has become something of a cult object – incorporates WiFi, a 90 per cent reduction in power usage compared with its more conventional peers, facility for hand-cranked energy supply and a video camera.

Also worthy is the Mex-x wheelchair, designed for disabled children and able to accommodate growth. Beautifully engineered in the German tradition by Ortopedia Vertriebsgesellschaft, it is not a contender that I can see winning, but I am pleased to see it included.

Another popular choice is Hussein Chalayan, who appears here with his Airborne Autumn/Winter 2007 collection. The most cerebral and intelligent of British fashion designers, the kind of superstar status and mainstream success achieved by his contemporaries has eluded Chalayan. Perhaps his clothes are just too beautiful, too clever.

Penguin books appear for the cover graphics of their Classics Deluxe Editions, as does the rather intriguing Burble London by Usman Haque, an interactive structure of illuminated coloured balloons which can be moved and re-formed by the public, allowing them to make their own mark on this most public and ephemeral of sculptures. Finally there is Martino Gamper with his 100 Chairs in 100 Days, a witty riposte to the concept of the designer classic in which Gamper assembled 100 chairs from bits and pieces and cannibalised donated chairs to create a range of junk-aesthetic, occasionally beautiful mongrel prototypes. Unafraid to fail and occasionally uproariously funny, Gamper’s quickfire chairs constitute a sharp response to the mindless designer consumerism that this shortlist has sharply ignored.

The overall winner will be chosen at the Design Museum on March 18. In eschewing the pointless tat that populates design stores, museum shops, Sunday supplements and lofts worldwide, the organisers have already done well.

Brit Insurance Designs of the Year runs until April 27 at the Design Museum, London SE1 www.designmuseum.org