Just reviewed the IDEA winners on idsa.org
A few thoughts;
IDSA does not know what it wants to be. Do they recognize styling, engineering, marketing, or thought. Look at the business/industrial category, some of the winners have a very low aesthetic priority while others are pure styling.
The pallet of design is risking becoming conservative and homogenized. Look at the winners under computer equipment. Little variation in form, proportion, color.
The real design action is in consumer products with a wide variety of design languages, interesting new product concepts and variation in forms, materials and colors.
However, somewhere, there is a big business disconnect. Although consumer products appear to require the hightest levels of design capability, it is the part of the industry with the greatest downward price pressures.
IDEO is a IDEA winning machine. They know how to put together great support for their work. With this sort of credibility, across all segments, why would a client want to work with anyone else?
thanks for mentioning. didnt know this was online yet.
mostly agree. the business section is odd. i like idea of design (ID?) being able to help 3rd world but when i checked out the ApproTec website ( http://www.approtec.org/tech_irrigate.shtml ) i didnt see what IDEO contributed. far as i can tell, these are old design ideas. from '96 or '98. here’s the 1998 product.
here’s the new one.
confused. maybe IDEO did something special. but was it ID? or engineering? can someone explain?
i see Crown made it in. again. makes me wonder if theres anything at all exciting happening in the world if they keep getting awards. no offense to them.
what makes sense to me is that Consumer has the most design. no disconnect. it’s BECAUSE of price competition that ID is becoming important in Consumer Products. in higher end products its still engineering function over everything.
overall its depressing to me. so much of the same kind of product. same old monitor bezels. even another dishrack! i know more and more people dont enter thinking its rigged or too much insider help. i dont know. but i hope the ID Magazine Annual cheers me up.
having entered and won IDSA awards in the past, they are a combination of function, innovation, market impact and styling. I think we can all agree as designers, that what makes a good design is not one of these criteria alone!
I do agree however, that the comptuer equipment looks very homogeneous… It seems to me that only the big companies win in this category!
