What I’ve learned from over a decade of judging James Dyson Award (JDA) design competition entries

Peter Gammack was one of Sir James Dyson’s first hires. He is an engineer with decades of experience and has helped judge the JDA since it first started. For Discussion: Peter explains entries to the James Dyson Award need to do if they want to win…

I have been helping Sir James, who makes the ultimate decision, to examine, test, and judge entries to the James Dyson Award since the beginning.

The one thing I find pleasantly surprising about being part of this incredible award is the momentum it has gained. What started out as a small design competition has now become an international award, which accepts entries from thousands of universities in over 30 countries.

With each passing year, I’ve noticed that the number and quality of entries have been getting better and better. But 2018 has been a bumper year. Perhaps this year more than ever, there were a lot of very strong entries. While this makes the task of judging more engaging than ever before, it had made awarding the prize so much harder.

Every year I work closely with James to help select one winner from thousands. We like to keep this process relatively simple. A team of engineers go through the entries in detail, refining that list down to 20. I really become involved in the judging process at this stage, when I take a better look at the Top 20 and whittle down the selection by testing them out. I make a sketch of each on a single sheet of paper which I then use to start shortlisting the best ideas. I engage Dyson’s own Intellectual Property team to check that the ideas are actually novel. Every year there will be a great idea, that looks like a winner, but which already exists.

Each comes with a description of the underlying idea, a demonstration showing how it works, and most importantly, an explanation of what problem they are trying to solve.

This is the first piece of advice I would give any prospective entrants to the JDA: try to solve a problem. That’s how the criteria which James will consider when he decides the overall winner. This really is a problem-solving competition, not a crowdfunding campaign.

A common problem people entering the award struggle with even once they’ve selected a problem is making sure that their solution is actually new.

Some problems recur more often than others. For example, a biodegradable type of plastic, is something that a lot of people over the years have tried to solve, so we’ve seen lots of different solutions, some better than others.

We see a lot of yearly themes. It’s slightly inevitable that ideas are dictated by the zeitgeist. It’s actually good that a lot of people are trying to solve problems that are “big problems” — whether they’re associated with environment, health, or politics.

We are interested in problem-solving so we try to give weight to the value of the solution, rather than the weight of the problem. But we’re always looking at the quality and execution of that solution. If somebody solved a very simple age-old problem, about cutlery, for example, it’s not necessarily easier than solving world hunger. It’s impressive whenever somebody solves a problem which nobody else could.

Hundreds of young inventors apply and many of them come up with incredible solutions to problems. We have to rank the entries by some other measure of how successful they have been. We do this by asking which inventor has had a “truly original” idea?

The O-Wind Turbine — this year’s international winner — is a great example of looking at a problem in a new way. Everybody understands the problem of trying to get clean sustainable energy — often through solar panels, tidal generators, or wind turbines. We need more energy each year and the ways we generate power have a major impact on our environment. There have been lots of solutions to this problem and most have focused on solar power. But wind is a largely untapped resource. It accounts for only four percent of global energy supplies but could be used to generate 40 times the electricity we consume worldwide.

The problem is that the wind doesn’t always come from the same direction, and the conventional thinking is that you rotate a single axis wind turbine with three impellers to face the direction in which the wind mostly comes.

No one I’d seen before had thought, “Well, what about if we can take the wind from any angle, or three-dimensionally?” This is precisely what the O-Wind Turbine can do as an omnidirectional wind turbine. It can take wind from any direction and turn it into energy. The key to finding a better solution, was in this case looking at the problem with fresh eyes and throwing out everything that had come before. This is something all entries to the James Dyson Award should aim to do.

There are of course many more problems still to solve, so I for one, look forward to seeing more ingenious solutions in 2019.

Words: Peter Gammack, Dyson VP — Design and New Technology

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