Domus Magazine asked me about design competitions and awards.
Question 1 – the idea of “good design”
Your question reminds me that years ago, the British Design Council used to proclaim that “good design is good business” . But it was always hard to define good design, let alone to demonstrate a link between good design and business performance. A better question for design now is not, “is it good?” but is it connected ?- connected with interesting questions, connected with social or environmental issues, and connecting people and organisations in novel combinations.
Question 2 – what design awards can tell us
Most but not all design awards are useless. There is no evidence that awards have the slightest impact on consumer attitudes. Any award that goes to an existing product celebrates old knowledge, embodied in an artefact, and is therefore a waste of everybody’s time. Awards to an individual designer are also a waste of time – but they make people feel good, and can be interesting, which is why I still get involved in them! The best ten per cent of design award schemes generate new projects, deliver a snapshot-in-time of current trends, and alert us to new ideas. The next best ten per cent are well-funded, and use expert juries to select winners who may not nominate themselves. The other 80 per cent are a money-making racket which exploit the hunger of designers for fame and recognition.
Question 3 – which innovation should be backed
Any intervention which raises new questions, connects new parties together, and thereby generates new knowledge, is worthwhile. The best existing scheme I know is the Student Design Awards organised by the Royal Society of Arts in London: these pro-active projects are based on current issues, and bring young designers and companies together for the first time. Some of the students work in teams. What happens during the projects is more interesting and valuable than who wins.
Question 4 – to whom are design prizes useful now?
Quite are few design awards are profitable to their organisers; a much smaller number is interesting; and to the designers who win them they are sometimes comforting; most of them are harmless; but hardly any are useful.
The kind of award I would like to organise, but which does not exist, would involve designers and companies working together on some future issue such as biomimicry , or social computing, or knowledge maps, or lightness.