Evolution of Design Competitions: A Scientific Study on the State-of-art of Design Competitions

First design competitions were searching for the “aesthetically beautiful” designs, schematics or drawings. That was the purpose. Design competitions have evolved. They are no longer just beauty competitions. As digital platforms advanced, design competitions have become something more. The rules have changed and the transformation is so great that once secondary aims, or externalities, out of the box thinking, innovative collobration, outsourcing design, subsidizing design or brand communication have become primary aims. Design competitions also grew in size, from sketches to protoypes to just ideas to complex product/service systems, and shifted in a direction to be more “multi-disciplinary” than ever. New aims such as community building, customer base formation, database building, co-branding with designers, recruiting of employees, money making, creating standards, social working, brainpower collection, trend identification and research have come to be. Many companies and platforms have appeared which exploit this new phenomenon. All these advancements are happenning out of academic sphere. Papers and discussions regarding design competitions date from 1970s are no longer valid, as they are from pre-internet periods, almost always about “architectural” competitions. This new phenomenon and transformation about design competitions is worth being investigated in a scientific approach. Because the design competitions are just too important for a “laissez-faire” kind of approach