Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, cilt.29, ss.171-191, 2012 (AHCI)
'Good design' awards are used as an effective tool to promote a country's products in the global market. They aim to raise society's and industry's awareness about well qualified product designs by presenting their merits. In this way, award-winning designs can be a good indicator of a country's ideals, qualities and characteristics of design. Design Turkey Industrial Design Awards is a state- supported biannual national award scheme, which was first organised in 2008. The author of this article directed the development of the award scheme by consulting the opinions of experts, scholars and professionals from the industrial design community in Turkey and coordinated the evaluation process. This article aims to explore the characteristics of winning product designs of Design Turkey Industrial Design Awards, through the evaluation criteria of the award scheme. The article begins with making a general overview of the origin and development of the 'good design' concept, especially within the scope of world-known Industrial Design Awards. Later, the development process for the Design Turkey Awards evaluation criteria is explained, with reference to opinions of the Turkish industrial design community. The application statements of award-winning designs, along with jurors' evaluation comments in response to various design criteria are analysed. The characteristics of award-winning designs are then defined through good design criteria. Finally, the extent to which the strengths of awarded designs match with the ideals of the Turkish industrial design community is discussed.