Dezeen promotion: organisers of the A'Design Award are calling for entries to their furniture, architecture and interior design categories.

Winners will receive a free and extensive public relations campaign for their design, plus the chance to feature in an annual book.

Designs will be judged by professionals, academics and a focus group.

All entrants will be given a detailed score sheet and feedback to help assess and improve their own work, plus a certificate and trophy.

Deadlines for entries are as follows:

Furniture design 30 November 2010
Architecture and building design: 31 January 2011
Interior design: 30 June 2011

See the A'Design website for further details and to enter the competition.

Here's some more information from the award organisers:

The competition was developed as a Ph.D. thesis first, but later we decided to go further and make it a reality; after an extensive research on design competitions and analyzing around 400+ competitions in very detail (checking 180 points of information on each) we have found out that the existing design competitions, especially the famous premium competitions were not good enough. Existing competitions were covert, there were no feedbacks other than you win / you lost, marketing was profit oriented and the scoring was not standardized.

We have come up with an extensively developed guideline and “quality-rank” mechanism for competitions and we applied these “quality-points” in our competition:

Feedbacks

Designers deserved something better, a good competition should provide at least an amount of solid feedback (so that designers could at least make a self-assessment of why they get their score, why they win or lose), so we come up with a score-sheet, for the first time, to give to designers after the competition, no matter they win or lose, they could still see which areas they were good at, which areas they needed improvements, they could compare their scores with the rest of the designers and they can see which percentile they are in.

Methodology

A good quality competition required transparently clean and explained methodology for voting, we could no longer tolerate keep this / eliminate that kind of approach, for each category we have a questionnaire that the jury members need to follow.

No Further Fees

No Further Fee requirements for Winners: Unlike other High-Profile competitions, we do not ask any further fees - I must remind RedDot asks 800€ from winners, this applies to IF, IDSA and others. Winners should not be losers. Although our competition looks profit-oriented, it is hardly so: we spend almost all of the income on advertising, organization and management of the event.

Academics Oriented

The purpose is most of all to provide an equal ground for designers to prove themselves. We aim to provide 15 Person Jury for each of the categories; this makes a huge 360 people jury (planned) for the all 24 competitions or (currently we have 45 people jury for 3 different competition types: Industrial/product Designs, Architecture and Others) . Jury is always announced at the end of the competition, because we believe that the Jury are not “advertising tools” and we want to keep it this way, and we also like to keep any outside influences away from the reach of jury before results are public.

Standardized Scoring

Score standardization and normalization is what makes the A’ Design Award and Competition differentiate from the rest; compare it to a TOEFL score; when you get a standard score from the TOEFL exam, you can use it anywhere in the world. It is an indication of proficiency. The scoring starts by explaining in detail what the criteria stands for, and the scoring continues by explaining what the score ranges means, and it will have necessary notes to make it more clear for all the jury members to clearly understand it. Most of the criteria are scored from a range of 0 to 11, while some of them will be yes or no questions The scores are standardized, weighted and normalized. However we have a base-limit for the number of applications, each category must reach 100 people to receive a standard score, because if the target participant numbers are not reached, we cannot apply score-standardization and normalization formulas (error margins are too high when the population size is small). How it works is simple : after voting, the scores given by the jury members are normalized and weighted, normalization of the scores helps to eliminate personal biases, while weighting the results make sure that specific questions are answered by the relevant parties; such as the votes of professionals will be higher on engineering and realization related questions and vote of academics will be higher on sustainability etc.

Publicity

We work with DesignPRWire, we use their database of press contacts, and we also get help from them to make the competition reach the biggest audience as possible. Our difference is that we do not only target “design oriented” magazines; we want to advertise the designers at every possible location as possible, because this is how it should be, you know it better; when we even speak about for example let’s say the most famous designer Philippe Stack, how many non-designers know him, we want to change that too.

Here is the example Evaluation Criteria for Industrial Design Categories for your consideration, of course it will be different for some categories:

Design

Form and shape, texture, finishing, graphical communication, colors and color options, material, innovation, emotional values, social context, targeted segment relevance, engineering, ease of use, surprise element, timelessness of design, design of the packaging or protective casing, overall complexity or simplicity, all of these details are addressed and are voted by three different juries, the juries have equal weight at this point, the questions are answered on a scale from one to ten.

Engineering

Function, ergonomics, usability, details, engineering, ease of production, efficiency of production, economies of scale, marketability, technological availability, safety, cost advantage, resource friendliness, sustainability, reparability, durability, impact on nature, recyclability, reusability and similar details are discussed and are voted by three different juries, the professional and academic jury's votes are given more importance according to the question, the questions are answered on a scale from zero to eleven.

Presentation

Presentation of design, visualization of use and maintenance, clearness representation and relevant details are addressed and are voted by three different juries, the focus group jury's votes are given relatively more importance, the questions are answered on a scale from zero to eleven.

Specific

For each different category and also for realized and concept stage products, the evaluation criteria will have different weights, and there is possibility of category specific evaluation criteria to be present. At this step details are discussed and are voted by three different juries and the professional and academic jury's votes are given more importance. The questions are answered on a scale from zero to eleven.

www.adesignaward.com