A council has made design awards for many years. Very generally, the overall criteria are design innovation, design for manufacture, appearance and ergonomics, ease of use, design for maintenance, performance, reliability, and commercial success. The design council recently introduced software as an award category. The author’s intentions in this paper are to relate some of his experiences as a judge, and to discuss “interesting points” and “challenging questions” that have emerged from his experiences on software award panels. He describes salient features of five winners over three years, but attempts to categorize neither the eligible software nor the winners.

This short paper--four of its seven pages are devoted to references and appendices listing past winners and panel members since 1986--discusses application of the broad criteria to software. Published in a collection of papers presented at the British Computer Society’s Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group, it appears to be a written version of a short and somewhat anecdotal invited talk to an audience of computer scientists, psychologists, ergonomists, sociologists, and electronic engineers.