FAQ Entry #479

This is a respond to a previously asked question about the A' Design Award and Competition. The full list of frequently asked questions can be accessed here.

#479: Can I come and visit your office to discuss my participation?

Absolutely not unless you are a press member. We are against personal pop-up visits by non-laureates (with the exception of press members and design associations). This policy was created because of many reasons but most importantly, it was created in order to ensure the fairness and integrity of the award program. Even for planned and agreed visits, we ask our guests not to bring gifts or to present us any complimentary products, of any value, including any items designed, manufactured or produced by them or their brand. Our no-visit policy has four fundamental reasons behind; 1) We have services (paid services as well as free services) in which we provide one to one support for participants; these services include the preliminary checks, manual submission service, portfolio evaluation service and others which answer all the questions of participants and participants can make use of all these services through our online portal, furthermore we have a very good dedicated support that answers questions of participants as well as press members very fast, which in general eliminate the need of personal visits. Most importantly, we want participants to ask the questions via our support for transparency reasons and we also want to provide answers and solutions to all participants instead of focusing on visitors. 2) Our office time is highly valuable; we spend most of our time improving the platform, working on initiatives, events and planning activities that are aimed at creating publicity and promotion of our laureates, and having guests in the office decreases our efficiency because when we have guests, we want to take care of them. 3) We have several trade secrets as well as initiatives that are under development, information regarding these initiatives and platforms are spread throughout our offices; including but not limited to whiteboards, strategic development and marketing documents as well as written literature which we wish to keep secret; and it is hard for us to keep our trade secrets and ongoing developments secret if we allow visitors to our offices. 4) It does not look fair when participants visit our offices; we do not want to create a perception of imposed friendship or alliance with any designer or brand unless they have firstly proven their value by winning the design award; i.e. through anonymous jury voting process. Given all these considerations, we are sad to state that we cannot allow your visit unless you are a press member.

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If you did not find your answer, please feel free to check the faq pages for more questions and answers. You will also want to check our webpage for details; thanks to our transparency policy, we document and publish everything.