Design awards support a variety of different design activities
Design awards are sponsored competitions intended to support a variety of different design activities. They are generally distinct from awards presented for life achievement, individual work phases, preexisting works, or visionary concepts and designs though organizers sometimes take these factors into account.
In addition to raising valuable publicity for the award winners, design awards also reflect positively on the sponsor organization. The market success or failure of a designed object often depends on factors that the designer can only partly influence.
As a result, design centers and design associations developed the design award as a platform to highlight extraordinary examples of design. A jury consisting of designers, company representatives, and sometimes journalists typically conducts the process of selecting the award winner.
Under the pretenses of professionalizing design, jurors were sometimes selected from other fields such as psychology, philosophy, or sociology, but this became less standard after the 1980s. The jury assesses the submitted designs (including user interfaces, a company look, or a product or product series) against criteria such as longevity, functionality, sustainability, or any other previously discussed (often ambiguous) criteria. The jury’s decision is ultimately subjective, and the attempts made in the 1970s to reduce the jury-decision process to a formula failed as did attempts to objectify or standardize design. The quality of a jury can be measured by its power to make its decisions plausible and convincing. Design awards have become an important public relations tool in a market environment where professionally designed products have become the norm.
They are particularly important for emerging designers and firms, as they offer the opportunity to have the quality of their work judged and endorsed by a neutral authority. (Asian manufacturers even pay bonuses to their designers for winning awards.) In the 1950s, design awards were predominantly associated with the sponsorship of public designs. Since then, they have evolved into large, international competitions that charge fees for everything from registration to catalog and Internet publication, or even for using the award’s logo making the organizers interested in offering as many awards as possible.
Yet, these awards provide a level of publicity otherwise unavailable to the individual designer or manufacturer, which gives rise to the question as to whether design awards are ultimately “bought” by the winner. It is also problematic that many sponsor organizations allow designers and manufacturers to participate in the competition and also act as members of the jury. Even if these individuals are asked not to take part in discussions or voting, this is a situation that obviously needs reconsideration.
The thematic focus of design awards is changing as quickly and dynamically as the areas of design themselves are developing but compared to architecture, however, there are still very few open design competitions. Competitions have proven complicated when they result in the sponsoring company proceeding to manufacture the award-winning design. Misunderstandings can only be avoided if the sponsor makes a clear distinction between the competition, award, and fee, and the design execution. Designers should never participate in a competition that requires the designer to transfer the copyright and rights of use to the sponsor (Intellectual Property).
“Emerging designer” awards represent a relatively new and important category. Compared to established designers who generally receive a certificate or trophy for their award winning work, up-and-coming designers are usually presented with a cash prize and the respected design awards publicize the event to other professionals in the field. Yet the recent exaggerated level of publicity given to “emerging” designers has created irrelevant designs that merely assimilate or repeat market conventions.
This is resulting in young designers on the whole beginning to conform to market demands due to the number of design awards offered, yet, at the same time, design awards have an equalizing effect because they offer the same extensive publicity to corporations, design departments, and new designers alike.