IDEA 2006 Timeline
February 13, 2006, 5:00 pm EST:
Regular application deadline.

February 20, 2006, 5:00 pm EST:
Late application deadline.*
(Extended deadline fee of $110 must be paid for your late entry to be accepted.)

Mid April, 2006:
Winners are notified by IDSA.

June 30, 2006:
Winners are announced to the public in BusinessWeek magazine

Sept. 17-20, 2006:
IDEA 2006 National Conference in Austin, Texas.

*Any edits to your entry between Feb. 13, 2006 at 5 p.m. EST and Feb. 20, 2006 at .5 p.m. EST will constitute a late entry and the extended deadline fee of $110 USD per entry must be paid by Feb. 20, 2006 at 5 p.m. EST, or the entry will not be judged.

*Entry fees are non-refundable. Entries cannot be submitted after Feb. 20, 2006 and will not be judged, returned or refunded. (Foreign late payments must be made with American Express, Visa or MasterCard, or with a check or money order in U.S. funds drawn on a U.S. bank.)

Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for IDEA 2006, the following criteria must be met:

Participant Qualifications

  • Open to designs and designers worldwide.
  • Open to students from NASAD and non-NASAD accredited schools and students from international industrial design programs. Student entries can only be submitted in the Student category, even if the design is in research, production or corporately funded.
  • If you entered last year and didn't win, and if your product still meets all the other criteria you can resubmit.
  • Employees of firms represented on the 2006 jury and student work from a school where a juror teaches may not participate in this year's competition.

Distribution qualifications

  • Design must have been placed in distribution between February 13, 2004 and February 13, 2006. This means the product must be available for sale in its final form through normal retail channels during that period.
  • Design Exploration and Student entries must have been submitted to the client or school between February 13, 2004 and February 13, 2006.
  • Design Exploration entries must not be in production
  • Research designs must have been submitted to the client or school between February 13, 2001 and February 13, 2006.

Judging Criteria
The IDEA 2006 judging is based on the following five criteria:

  • Innovation: how is the design new and unique?
  • Aesthetics: how does the appearance enhance the product?
  • User: how does the design solution benefit the user?
  • Environment: how is the project ecologically responsible?
  • Business: How did the design improve the client's business?

Judging Process

  • The judging is blind: the designers, their names and the names of consulting firms may not appear anywhere in the entry kit. Failure to abide by this rule results in immediate disqualification. Names of manufacturing companies/clients may appear.
  • Jurors, their immediate families or the companies they are employed by may NOT enter work the year they are jurors.
  • Jurors do their initial scoring online in teams of two to make a preliminary pass-through of their assigned categories. After this first round of scoring, the jurors meet in person for three-and-a-half days, during which time they review and score the information presented in the semi-finalist’s entry kits.
  • Each entry is scored on its own rating sheet based on how well it meets the criteria of design excellence: innovation, benefit to user, benefit to client, ecological responsibility and appropriate aesthetics.
  • All criteria receive equal weight in scoring and award selection.
  • QuickTime or Windows Media Player videos of the designs in use (.avi or .wmv file formats), as well as photos, augment the essay information the jurors review in scoring each entry.

Disclaimer

By submitting your entry, you agree that any or all of the material may be published and utilized by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), BusinessWeek and any other party authorized by IDSA and/or BusinessWeek in connection with the awards. No material submitted will be considered confidential.

All decisions by the jury and/or IDSA are final.

Questions: Contact Us.