Visions of Good Design

Speck Observer

Visions of Good Design

By Dina - September 10th, 2010

So, we’re applying for a design award.

You have to be a little more familiar with the Speck Design mind in order to really appreciate the novelty of this particular moment–but to catch you up to speed in a phrase: we don’t do design awards.

An enduring concept that’s emerged from the innovation management conversations among Speck Design’s management team, board of directors, and advisory council is this a notion that the most organic, sustainable and effective way to craft our vision of the future is to reward the behaviors and nurture the patterns that get us there. Reward systems fundamentally carve the trajectory of a person and the nature of a system, industry, or relationship. And as a principle, rewards operate irrespective from an agent’s active energy to drive toward a vision of the future or their natural impulse to reward those behaviors in which they delight.

Award structures are the sort of thing you want to examine every so often, to make sure the things we reward are still furthering the goals we seek. In the case of the product design industry, we’ve been overdue for one of these check-ins.

Just a few weeks ago, I forwarded Don Norman’s article on Why Design Contests are Bad, knowing my creative director, Tark Abed would be thrilled to see it. Don Norman takes a critical eye to the structure of design awards, calling for reform and expressing a sentiment long held by Speck Design. The design industry maverick captures the core of the issue most succinctly, writing “[design awards] reward the visible parts – styling – and ignore the most important, but hardest parts: interaction, experience, truly meeting needs, and even economic success.” And at Speck, those “hard parts” are precisely the areas of design we focus upon. So soon after, when I found Maria Popova with a similar critique in Design Observer it got me spending my morning-shower brainstorms willing these droplets of criticism would cascade into a typhoon that swept the design award tyrant from its thrown atop the industry.

So when Tark approached me earlier this week, excited about a design award he had a submission for, I was pretty floored. Clearly this one must be different, but as I’m not there on my to-do list yet, ’twill have to wait for further examination! Stay tuned…

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