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Awards madness
To be Number One, the champion, the winner – it’s a natural human aspiration, an irresistible biological imperative that inevitably breeds competition. Consequently, awards are epidemic: even the competitions are competing. In the realm of graphic design, there are thousands of awards: D&AD, Webbys, the European Design Awards, Art Directors Club awards, Tokyo Type Directors Club awards, YoungGuns, Red Dot awards, Young Asian Designers, even a Seoul Design Olympiad.
There are competitions run by magazines, paper companies and software companies. There are international poster annuals, biennials and triennials. Competitions for the design of T-shirts, logos, stickers, banknotes, flags and stamps. Real-time gladiatorial contests such as Cut&Paste’s Digital Design Tournament and Layer Tennis. And when entering them leaves you designed out, you could write about it and enter the Winterhouse awards for design writing and criticism.
But is competition really unavoidable? Is it even desirable? Are awards really a useful way to ‘bring out our best’? Design awards usually have admirable goals. Part of D&AD’s mission is to ‘set creative standards, educate, inspire and promote good design and advertising’. The Art Directors Club ‘celebrates and inspires creative excellence’, ‘promoting the highest standards of excellence and integrity in visual communications’.
Even if we take a critical or cynical stance against awards, existing assumptions about the inevitability and value of competition, and the struggle to conquer each other generally, are rarely challenged.
However, research belies the assumption that competing leads to better work. Morton Deutsch’s social psychology experiments with university students found that awarding victorious competitors not only had no effect on how well they performed but in tasks that relied on working together produced significantly poorer results. In his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, 1986 / 1992, Alfie Kohn surveys research from education, economy, sports, the arts and other fields and the evidence is counter-intuitive yet unequivocal: competition mostly results in poorer performance, reduced satisfaction and less creativity. Yet in the historical contest between co-operation and competition, competition whipped co-operation’s ass real good. It is the cornerstone of modern global economy and ideology. Competition is presented as an antidote to monopoly, mediocrity and even totalitarianism, though rarely as ingrained rivalry that manifests itself in war, poverty and environmental ruination. Could we imagine a cultural landscape without it? Wouldn’t all visual communication look predictable, disconnected and, well, like the content of a lot of design awards annuals? . . .
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