1. Make a clear separation between awards, on the one hand, and competitions and challenges, on the other. If designers want to give each other awards and prizes, fine. But activities outside the tent should operate according to different principles.

2. Design the desired outcomes of the competition first. The focus should ideally be on posing new questions, connecting people to new people, and helping them learn from each other’s other experience. Exhibits, books, winners and ceremonies are a means to an end, not the end itself.

3. Focus on the discovery of new and meaningful questions to do with with daily life issues — not on pre-cooked solutions. The most valuable outcome is a question that excites people, that is meaningful, and that becomes a shared focus for a wider variety of people to join the conversation.

4. Focus on "wicked" challenges. Rather than solicit fully-formed design objects or "visions," ask entrants to create platforms and contexts in which diverse groups of people may co-design the systems, institutions and processes that shape our daily lives.

5. Focus on tools more than on messages and solutions. These can be tools for perceiving, seeing, understanding, conversing. They can be tools for sharing and organizing and exchanging. And yes, they can be tools for making things; the carrying capacity of the biosphere is not limitless, but neither is it zero.

6. Get real: Insist on external partners and a live context. The identification of individuals and groups who are already out there, and active, is a key part of the value competitions can create. One way to do this is by posing three questions upfront: What might life in a sustainable world be like? Who, out there, is already experimenting? And how can design help us get there? Reassure participants that incremental improvements to an existing reality will be taken just as seriously as blue-sky scenarios.

7. Provide communication support throughout the process. Make writers, filmmakers and storytellers available to the program as a whole. This will ensure that the most important outcomes — meaningful new conversations — are well prepared. It follows from this that PR or corporate communications will support, but not own, such competitions.

8. Ensure that there is adequate time, expertise and resources for entries to be evaluated. Entrants should be required to provide independent evidence to support their claim, and the jury process should have its own capability to interrogate those claims.

9. Make the judging public. Various formats are possible — from a court-room trial or Pecha Kucha to Dragon's Den. The key point is to expose as many people as feasible to the content of jury deliberations. The deliverable, here, is the capability of more people to interrogate the propositions of experts and specialists critically.

10. Provide ongoing stewardship for the community of participants, experts, judges and sponsors that a competition brings together. This connecting is itself a form of innovation. It should not stop with a winners' ceremony.

[via @zeldman from Happy Cog]