Oticon Intiga, winner of both Danish Design Award Industrial Design B2C and -People’s Choice
The annual Danish Design Award yesterday introduced two new excellent initiatives: People’s Choice Award and a Talent Award for promising design students. But could the award presentation be turned into a red carpet style media event?
Designers are notoriously bad at getting out there and promote themselves as media personalities, and will generally prefer being picked by a respected curator rather than promoting themselves. The new Talent Award could be a great way to increase media awareness among design students, and give the selected few a starting push toward building their personal brand. That is, if they’re willing to start cooperating with the media.
The People’s Choice Award is another great way to increase awareness of the importance of design and the design industry. The concept is well known from many other types of contests that try to involve the audience more than being mere spectators to the judgement of experts. But success obviously relies on whether anybody is actually voting or paying attention to the results. And that takes media coverage.
Media coverage
Minister of Culture Uffe Elbæk spreading glamour at the award presentation
In line with the little investigation I made of ‘design’ on Infomedia a few posts back, most mainstream newspapers seem to have dutifully reported the results of the design awards (industry news). Judging by the pictures, however, the award presentation seemed like a relatively small and private event in the café at Danish Design Centre, and the journalists may not have done much more than rework the story from available press releases.
Judging by an article in the Danish national newspaper Politiken, the shutting down of commercial activities and focus on core business at DDC may have a lot to do with a substantial loss of government funding and a less than sympathetic stakeholder satisfaction analysis.
This makes it doubtful that DDC will be able to lure in the press with a big red carpet style award show in the foreseeable future. But something needs to be done because without genuine press interest, the two other components: designer branding and public participation simply doesn’t work.
