FAQ Entry #543

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.

#543: Is it true you disqualify many people?

Thinking in percentages, the disqualification is very low, very rare. Every year, among thousands, we disqualify a few entries, mostly due to plagiarism, intellectual property theft, and sometimes for alleged despicable behavior, there are certain times this kind of thing happens, and in general each is a distinct scenario, when it happens, when we think there are ground for disqualification, this is a truly rare thing, so that’s not something a sane person or normal brand should be worrying about, unless for example you make it a hobby of yours to steal other’s designs, patent them, and then sue the initial original designers with your legally valid patents (for example this may be legal in some jurisdictions but is outright unethical also psychopathological behavior) so if you are such an entity we would disqualify you and then also stop answering emails or cease communication with you, without explaining you anything, because of course there is nothing we could gain at such cases, and of course there could always be false positives, you would think, but before we disqualify we think truly a lot, because each disqualification is an immense costs; everyone we disqualify, regardless of the reason, goes and leaves a bad review, creates negative discourse, engages in gossip and bad word of mouth, these are substantial and sometimes can cost us a lot; imagine people noting the following: We were invited to A' Design Award and even so get disqualified. This is a correct statement, in the past we disqualified people whom we ourselves have invited, because later we figured out due to 3rd parties reporting for example, or by journalists or press members indicating, that there were allegedly deep problems. When such alleged problems arise, would we not disqualify because we had invited them? Absolutely is irrelevant whether we invited them or not, if we think that the winner has grounds for disqualification, regardless of whether they are guilty or not (as would be demonstrated in court, again recall that legal and ethical are two different concepts, so they may have legal foundation but unethical foundation at the same time), then we at our sole discretion take action. In general, we will disqualify you, if we think you did something very bad, even if it is alleged, even if you perhaps were legally empowered to do it, if we think what you did is super unethical. Of course if you did something illegal we would also disqualify you. However, every year, only a few entries get disqualified, it is a miniscule number. If you are disqualified, sometimes we don't even reply you because some of the entities that are disqualified are allegedly so disturbing that we rather don't communicate with them. This is also done to distance A' Design Award and all other A' Design Award winners away from the disqualified party and their disqualified work. If you have good design, we want to align with you. So it is not true that we disqualify many people, and when we do it, it hurts us, but we do it a few times a year, among thousands of entries, each year, every year, if we truly believe (regardless from a legal perspective they think they have legal right or not - if the actions or work they had ultimate provided is discovered to be unethical). Sometimes the issue is not just the design itself, for example one design maybe not a problem, but in some cases we get reports of multiple ethical issues relating to one entity, that's a lot, because we rarely get any issue for any entity let alone multiple ethical issues, for example imagine there is a design, multiple people report, and then imagine there is a designer, whose design is perhaps original, but has a portfolio filled with many unethical works, too much inspired sometimes, when we got many reports, we act. Moreover, there are also technical reasons why an entity maybe disqualified, so not all disqualified people have ethical problem, sometimes they get disqualified because of technical issues but these kind of disqualifications don't happen post results, the technical disqualifications usually occur during voting, such as a nomination without any images, cannot be evaluated, we would normally under such condition ask for images, and when voting complete, there are still no images, that kind of work could get disqualified, likewise for example results are announced let's say and a designer deletes all the images from their presentation and says to us, well we could not get a license to put them, so know it looks we awarded a white board, everything blank, of course such works would also get disqualified. So disqualifications are rare, mostly technical and occur during voting. Post-result disqualifications are very rare, and are due to alleged super unethical conduct (determined by our sole discretion, for the parties that do such conduct they don't think it is unethical for sure, like how you would patent other's designs and sue them, for example, it can have legal framework but is super unethical) and sometimes we are asked to disqualify or withdraw award by the winners for their own reasons, but when the winner asks this is called withdrawal and is distinct from disqualified, so to be disqualified, you need to be something special, it is not normal, we don't disqualify many people, and in general we don't comment on the disqualified people's negative remarks because we don't truly wish to engage with such entities. Rest assured no one normal gets disqualified, and we have processes like Ombudsman, contact, review board among others to check it. In general we don't publicly disqualify, we do it silently, to make damage control for all parties, however we had recent times see disqualified entities being emboldened and leaving many negative reviews, so we wanted to explain this very deeply here that it is absolutely not normal to get disqualified from A' Design Award and it hints, allegedly, a big ethical issue, and sometimes a technical issue. In general if disqualified after results, mostly due to ethical or legal issue, if disqualified before or during voting, then generally a technical issue (presentation lacking all images or a designer updating all images and the design becomes completely different right after voting for example, which if the designer don't restore the images, may be a ground for disqualification, indeed for this reason, we recently start locking designs and not permitting changes after voting (initially we were letting people make minor tweaks but we were noticing some were winning an award with a design and it could become another but since we were manually controlling these changes unbeknownst to users, we were informing them to rollback changes and if they cannot fix it (because maybe they did not have the design to begin with or they don't have rights to do so) we would disqualify them, with our new system this don't happen anymore as we just lock entries)) - so to reiterate, it is not true we disqualify many people (percentage wise), we disqualify a very low percent of people, but because we have tens of thousands of winners, this number may initially seem a lot, but percentage wise, very little,

Keywords: disqualification

The following questions could be related:

• #507: Did you delete my nominated design?

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.