Research On American IDEA Awarding System

The Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) is the most prestigious contest for industrial designers and their products worldwide. The IDEA contest was hosted by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). In the early 1990s the IDSA began to cooperate with Business Week, which greatly improved American industrial design's international influence to business world and the public American industrial design is playing an important role in the industry and successfully attract attention from all over the world.This paper focuses on the awarding system of the IDEA and the cooperation between the IDEA and Business Week, exploring the IDEA's evolution and the important role played by commercial media to increase business and public understanding of industrial design.The research theme of the IDEA is of high significance to theoretical development and will contribute meaningful ideas to professional designers in practice and other interested parties. There is little work on a competition selection mechanism of industrial design is done by former researchers within China. This paper tries to fill the domestic gaps. From the practical perspective, the rising activities of various industrial design awards in the country lack of a well-defined standards and criteria in selection system. The American experience of the IDEA might offer valuable lessons for Chinese industrial design development.