Hasta La Ideas

pimg alt=”dn-judges.jpg” src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/dn-judges.jpg” width=”468″ height=”348″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pEvery year the world holds many contests for industrial designers. Lots of submissions, lots of time spent by jurors reviewing them, lots of pretty pictures afterwards. Fun to read, wonderful for the winners. What’s the problem?/p

pI have been a juror for a number of contests, including the major American yearly contest sponsored by the iIndustrial Design Society of America, IDSA/i, and iBusinessWeek/i. Although I always enjoyed the experience and the interaction with talented, hard-working fellow jurors, I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the results. /p

pWhy are shows bad? Shouldn’t we reward good design? Sure, if that’s what the shows accomplish, but they don’t. In fact, I believe they do harm to the profession. They reward the visible parts – styling – and ignore the most important, but hardest parts: interaction, experience, truly meeting needs, and even economic success. Oh sure, the rhetoric that accompanies the awards often heaps praise upon these other aspects of design, but that praise is not based upon solid evidence. No tests or studies, no independent evidence. As a result, the contests perpetuate the myth that industrial design is primarily about style and that brilliant styling leads to success in the marketplace. Both statements are false./p

pJurors in design contests can only judge the material submitted to them. Invariably, the contest entries consist only of drawings, photographs, and videos accompanied by lush words of praise written by the design team, their company or client, or worse, their PR agency. Most of the time the actual products are not available for the jurors, nor can they be, when some products are tractors or cranes, air-conditioning units or automobiles – things far too large to transport to the jurors. As a result, jurors cannot experience them in use, they can’t watch the intended audience use them, they can’t assess how well they provide for graceful interaction, what pleasure or pain they provide, what benefits they provide. These problems result in fundamental limits to design contests./p

pI recently spoke with a founder of one of the largest and most successful design firms in the world who confessed that although his firm consistently wins multiple awards year after year, he is frequently puzzled by the choices. Entries he considered mediocre (from his own company) would at times win top prizes whereas entries he considered exemplary and superior would sometimes get passed over. What does that tell us of the contests?/p

pWell-meaning, well-qualified judges are thwarted by the system. They are doomed to fail, for they lack the information required to make informed, intelligent choices. The only thing that can be judged is appearances. As a result, these shows perpetuate the myth that design is only about appearance./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_contests_are_bad_17024.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TAfEUudjxKao848Lp7IfXW5T6Q0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TAfEUudjxKao848Lp7IfXW5T6Q0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TAfEUudjxKao848Lp7IfXW5T6Q0/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TAfEUudjxKao848Lp7IfXW5T6Q0/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p