Core 77 Juror Experience
Don’t let anyone ever tell you being a juror for a design awards event will only take a little bit of time. Be ready to invest evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks. Also — its worth it.
Design awards are a blessing to our industry. They expose us to projects that we’d rarely see any other way. They organize, catalog, and present a variety of complex explorations in a single repository. The benefits of this service to anyone interested in design and design thinking are multiple.
For instance, to scan the web looking for projects as part of your own research takes an immense amount of time. It’s difficult to know where to even look. Design awards employ the industries best curators to read, analyze, compare, consider, and rank — for you.
Award categories
The curation piece is not a trivial matter.
With my co-jurors, we reviewed, discussed, and debated just under 100 submissions across two categories: Strategy & Research and Service Design. Each author or set of authors provided videos, images, thesis statements, PDF’s, websites, and written descriptions of their process.
Winning submissions do a thorough job of presenting the reason for the inquiry; what was learned; and the impact of their concepts or prototypes. In the juror’s mind, each submission competes not only on the merits of the results, but really, the communications of a rigorous inquiry.
Winners uniquely articulate a process to expose insights that are packaged into expressions of truthfulness.
As a juror, it is exhausting to maintain the required level of objectivity and critical thinking when reviewing one submission after the next. If each submission requires a minimum of 15-mins to review and ponder, I may have spent roughly 1,500-minutes or 25-hours (after my work hours) to curate professional and student work. My group was composed of four members, which translates into roughly 100-hours! On top of that is another 4-6 hours of group discussion.
Jurors Emily Provit McNamara, Charles Erdman, Karina Totah, Michal Levin, and Parul Vora
Fortunately, our crack group of jurors all had thoughtful feedback and provided lively discourse during the final deliberation. And who benefits from all this work? Well… you, me, and those that made an immense effort to engage in the work of Design.
For the winners, I hope they are provided a level of validation that will encourage them to continue practicing in the field. Even those who got a consolation prize may find a modicum of satisfaction through this recognition.
Take a moment to view the Core 77 Winners, Runner Ups and Honorable Mentions from all the categories. If Service Design is your thing or you just love Strategy & Research, you won’t be disappointed.
