Winter Competitions Roundup

With snow blanketing the Northeast, and Presidents Day just around the corner, many of us can expect to have a little extra time on our hands this weekend. Maybe too much extra time—after all, you can only spend so many hours wrapped in your Snuggie sipping hot cocoa before cabin fever sets in. Which is why we wanted to take a moment to remind our readers of the numerous design competitions that are now accepting entries—including a few with deadlines coming up in the next week. If you need a project to work on this weekend, here are a dozen particularly worthy-sounding contests. (For a more complete, and frequently updated, roster of design competitions, be sure to check out our online Events section.)

Competition Competition 2010
Architizer.com is running a new kind of architectural award: one that chooses its winner from the losing competition entries of 2009. Every year architects submit thousands of projects to competitions without receiving recognition or compensation for their work; this award is a do-over. Entrants are only required to upload three images, a text description, and credit information for the entire team. Submissions will be evaluated solely on their architectural merit, not on the criteria of the original competition for which they were created.
Submission deadline: February 15

IDEA: International Design Excellence Awards
The IDEA program is a premier international competition honoring design excellence in products, eco-design, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research, and concepts. Entries are invited from designers, students, and companies worldwide.
Submission deadline: February 15

Your Great Green Places
The National Building Museum is calling on architects, planners, landscape architects, students, and the general public to grab a video camera, or even a cell phone, and document great green places in their communities. Films should be no longer than six minutes and should investigate what works as the local neighborhood’s “Great Green Place.” Selected videos will be screened during the D.C. Environmental Film Festival, in March.
Submission deadline: February 15

City of Dreams Pavilion Competition
This is an international competition to design and build a pavilion as a central gathering place on Governors Island, in New York. Entrants are asked to consider how they will construct this temporary structure in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. The goal is to create a pavilion that has net-zero impact and that serves as a prototype for a new, truly sustainable way of thinking about design and construction.
Registration deadline: February 16; submission deadline: February 23

ULI Amanda Burden Urban Open Space Award
This award celebrates and promotes vibrant, successful urban open spaces by annually recognizing and rewarding an outstanding example of a public destination that has enriched and revitalized its surrounding community. Eligible projects will be in North America; be at least 10,000 square feet; and have been open to the public for at least one year and no more than 15 years.
Submission deadline: February 19

Street Furniture Competition
The fabric of any city has pockets of underutilized and neglected spaces. These vacant pieces of the city are often intended for development at some point in the future but currently sit empty and unused. The Chicago chapter of Architecture for Humanity is looking for designs for street furniture that can be easily distributed to vacant sites and parks throughout the city for two months this summer.
Submission deadline: February 26

Culture Counts: UNESCO Poster Competition
The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2010 the “International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures.” UNESCO is asking graphic designers to express their vision and understanding of the “Rapprochement of Cultures” by creating posters that emphasize the importance of exchange and dialogue among and between cultures in ensuring social cohesion and harmonious coexistence. Thirty posters will be selected for printing and showcasing at UNESCO Headquarters during the International Festival of Cultural Diversity in May 2010. One overall winner will receive a $2,000 cash prize plus an invitation to attend the poster exhibition in Paris.
Submission deadline: March 9

Personal Infrastructures: SMIBE 2010 Short Film Competition
SMIBE welcomes moving-image stories that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing. SMIBE invites creative professionals and college and university students from architecture, landscape, art, industrial design, interior design, motion graphics, and film to produce a three-minute story about memorable characters and the infrastructures in their lives. Submissions should not exceed three minutes in duration and can be produced in any motion-image medium.
Submission deadline: March 31

Suburbia Transformed, One Garden at a Time
This juried competition will assemble contemporary projects that explore green technologies within the context of the aesthetics of human landscape experience on small residential sites. The emphasis is on how emerging sustainable strategies and tactics are used to create human landscape experiences that are beautiful, inspiring, perhaps profound, and which might serve as examples for transforming the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time.
Submission deadline: April 16

Electrolux Design Lab 2010
Electrolux Design Lab 2010 invites global undergraduate and graduate industrial design students to create home appliances that consider shrinking domestic spaces. Your ideas will shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050, when 74 percent of the world’s population is predicted to live in an urban environment. Growing populations living in concentrated areas dictate a need for greater space efficiency. This year, special consideration will be given to designers that submit a design within the context of a range or suite of solutions/appliances. Your design ideas should address key consumer requirements: being green, adapting to time and space, and allowing for individualization.
Submission deadline: May 1

The Living Climate Change Video Challenge
IDEO and Design 21 are calling for an original video that envisions how climate change will impact life on Earth over the next 20 to 30 years. What behaviors will need to change? Which will we choose to preserve? The Living Climate Change Video Challenge is an open invitation to designers and non-designers alike to think creatively about an issue that impacts us all.
Submission deadline: May 25

Lulan Artisans 11˚/17˚ Textile Competition
This competition celebrates craftsmanship, promote talent, and provide opportunities for textile artists interested in being part of the Lulan Artisans community. Up to five winning designs will become part of the 2010 Lulan collection, and a cash prize of $1,500 will be awarded for each winner.
Submission deadline: May 31
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