Ten times a juror. What I learned about great design.
“Design should not dominate people. It should help people. That’s its role.”
When I received my first invitation to the iF Design Award jury in 2019, I treated it as a one-off episode. A pleasant one, sure, but singular. I had no idea that over the next six years I would be invited nine more times to judge at the most prestigious design competitions in the world. iF Design Award. ADC Annual Awards at its hundredth, jubilee edition. DesignEuropa Awards EUIPO three years running. Taiwan International Student Design Competition. Dobry Wzór twice. And since January 2026, the Advisory Board of the Central European Creative Awards.
Each invitation came from a different part of the world, a different institution, a different question about my perspective. But they all had one thing in common. They were a decision by the organizer that my work and my judgement were worth including in the group that determines what gets the seal of quality in international design that year.
Six years later I know something I did not know at the start. Being on the other side of the jury table is not a reward for a career. It is one of the most powerful tools for professional development available to a designer who has already reached a certain level. Every session changes how you look at your own work. After ten sessions you have something that is hard to describe briefly. A calibration of the eye that cannot be acquired any other way.
This is what you actually take away from those six years.
iF Design Award. Hannover, 2020. The first session that changed everything.
iF is one of the three largest design competitions in the world. Running in Germany since 1953, it accepts submissions from fifty countries across seventy product categories. Thousands of products every year. The iF stamp on a product means something in every design shop from Tokyo to Copenhagen.
My first session, in February 2020, was in-person.. The werhouse converted for the competition. And what I saw there is an experience you do not forget. Imagine six thousand products gathered under one roof. Televisions, refrigerators, cars, medical equipment, professional devices, furniture, lighting, toys, accessories, everything from the smallest electronic gadgets to industrial machines the size of a room. Every product is physically there. You can walk up, touch it, pick it up, see it in scale, check how it works. That alone is an experience for any designer. Three days walking through a hall containing the best things the design world produced that year — like a children's candy store stocked only with the finest.
But the hall is not the most striking thing. What strikes you is what you discover in the jury room.
A hundred jurors. All active practitioners. Heads of Design at major global corporations. Directors of the world's best design studios. Chief Design Officers at automotive groups. Renowned professors from the leading design schools whose books you had read breathlessly. Independent designers whose names you knew from trade magazines. And somewhere among them, me.
On the first day, when each juror briefly introduces themselves to the whole group, you start to understand where you have landed. You are assigned to a small team — mine included the Head of Design at Sony, a Fuji Films counterpart, a well-known professor, and the owner of one of the best design studios in Germany. For the next three days I would be sitting and discussing products with people whose work I had known as an admirer and a repeat user for years.
When I introduced myself on that first day and said I was from Poland and had won the iF Gold Award in 2014 for the DICE+ project, the room went quiet, and then there was an applause I did not expect and did not yet understand. Back then, the iF Gold was just another award I had won six years earlier and rarely thought about. I always knew it was prestigious. I did not fully understand how much.
The room's reaction opened my eyes for the first time. These people, the best designers in the world, many of them still dreaming about that award because they do not have it yet. They looked at me with a mixture of respect and a touch of envy, and I sat there a little stunned, trying to understand what that award actually means in the industry. It also showed how many of them had been jurors before — because only by being on the inside can you understand what I did not yet know then.
Over the next three days, as we worked through the process of deliberating and awarding iF Gold, everything became clear. iF Gold is not an award for a "nice product." It is the highest evaluation that the entire jury must accept. One objection can cost you the gold. The mechanism is built so that the award passes only when nobody in the room has significant doubts. It is not a majority decision. It is a decision by consensus and genuine recognition from the industry.
Standing on that stage in 2014, alongside Apple, Sony, HP and the other global names receiving iF Gold — that was not coincidence or a lucky break in one edition. It was something the entire expert body considered worthy of the highest recognition. I understood that only in 2020, sitting on the other side, watching how rarely that decision is made and how exceptional a product has to be to earn it.
iF online. The 2021 edition and a lesson I would rather have avoided.
The second iF invitation, for 2021, arrived in the middle of a pandemic. Traditional sessions were impossible. iF built digital tools and moved the entire process online. I will say it plainly — this was unfair to those submitting. It is not about the quality of the tools. iF handled it technically as well as could be managed. The problem is that evaluating a product you cannot touch is fundamentally different from evaluating one you have in front of you.
When you approach a physical product, you sense things within seconds that no description conveys. How the finish responds to light. How a hinge feels under your finger. How the weight of the product matches its apparent delicacy or solidity. How a screen's resolution looks live versus on a render. How keyboard sound helps or hinders use. These are design decisions you evaluate literally through your senses. Online, much of that is gone.
In the digital 2021 session, all we had were photographs, descriptions and short videos. Every chance to touch a product became gold. Every photograph that conveyed materiality was worth ten times more than a purely promotional shot. This created a strange asymmetry — products that would previously have been evaluated in reality were in 2021 judged entirely through the lens of how their creators had photographed them. And that was not only an iF problem but a feature of all pandemic-era editions. This process also opened the door to all the pre-selection rounds that now happen in this form permanently.
Looking back, that situation taught me one of the most practical lessons of my career. I return to it every time I prepare product materials for clients. The first photograph must explain the product without words. Because nobody has time to read your description. Hundreds of products, limited time, tired jurors. The first impression decides whether a product gets a chance at serious discussion at all, or even triggers the desire to dig deeper when the submission has not made it easy enough.
This mechanism, incidentally, is why organizers of international competitions select only active, experienced practitioners for juries. Not critics. Working designers who are themselves making products for the market at the same time. Because only someone who designs every day can assess in a few seconds how significant a design challenge lay behind that particular product. Whether it was something difficult or easy. Whether the team handled it brilliantly or with difficulty and in poor style. Those subtle assessments are impossible for anyone outside the field.
The second reason for selecting a large number of jurors also concerns fairness. Even among experienced designers from the same industry, there are completely divergent evaluations of the same product. One sees genius, another sees mediocrity. Only a large enough group allows you to draw a reasonable average that does not disadvantage anyone and does not disproportionately reward products that simply happened to appeal to one particular juror.
ADC Annual Awards. The hundredth edition of a competition older than most living designers.
In 2021 I received an invitation to jury the ADC Annual Awards at its jubilee, hundredth edition. A competition founded in New York in 1921, when modern advertising, branding and industrial design as we know them today did not yet exist. A hundred years later it still runs and still sets the standard for the entire American creative industry.
ADC differs from iF or DesignEuropa in scope. It brings together advertising, branding, packaging, illustration, motion design and product design. This is not a narrow design competition. It is a competition for creativity in the broadest sense, where the world of design and the world of advertising agencies meet in one place — two cultures that normally work alongside each other but rarely talk. A competition that across its hundred-year history honored Andy Warhol, Saul Bass, Charles and Ray Eames, Paul Rand and Annie Leibovitz. The hundredth edition carried a particular weight.
So you can imagine that receiving an invitation to the jubilee edition was something more than a regular jury role. The room — virtually again, the pandemic continued — was made up of people whose work anyone who encounters media will recognize. Advertising that entered popular culture and is still referenced today. Brands we use every day. You look at the list of names and think: these people changed the way the world communicates. The way I communicate.
From this session I took away something that today directly influences how I advise clients on projects combining product design with brand building. A designer looks at a product and sees form, materials, ergonomics. An advertising person looks at the same product and sees a promise, a narrative, an emotion. A brand strategist sees consistency and positioning. Each perspective is valid and each is incomplete. The best products win because they work on all these levels simultaneously. It is not a matter of luck. It is a matter of complementarity — someone consciously designed all those layers to give a coherent picture.
When today I talk with a startup founder who has come to me asking for "just product design," I often return to this experience. Because I know that a project meant to work internationally needs more than good form. It needs to tell a story that makes sense regardless of who is looking and from which part of the world.
DesignEuropa Awards EUIPO. Three years that changed my understanding of intellectual property.
DesignEuropa Awards, organized by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, is only ten editions old, yet it has had no trouble establishing itself among the most prestigious European design competitions. In 2021 I was a finalist for the electronic stethoscope StethoMe. Two years later, in 2023, I received a jury invitation. It repeated in 2024 and 2025. Three consecutive editions on the judging panel, each one shifting the perspective on competitions even further.
The experience of landing on both sides of yet another competition remains unique. I know exactly what a company feels when its product is invited to the final — that mixture of pride, uncertainty, anxiety about whether you performed well enough against the rest. I also know how jurors discuss the same product behind closed doors, what questions arise, which arguments persuade and which fall flat — because more than once my position turned out to be the deciding one. This sharpens the sense of responsibility enormously and builds a strong drive to fulfil the evaluation task as rigorously as possible.
The judging criteria at EUIPO are largely similar to those at iF and other serious competitions. Aesthetics, usability, innovation, quality of execution. But at EUIPO there is something not found anywhere else to the same degree — evaluation of intellectual property management. Is the design properly registered as a Registered Community Design. Does the company use IP rights consistently. Is the product on the market consistent with what was registered. This makes EUIPO not just a design competition but, in a sense, a strategic one — it rewards companies that understand design as an economic asset and manage it consciously. And after so many sessions and visits to EUIPO, something has sunk in about my own work: at the end of the day, what I do is sell my intellectual property.
The most important thing these three years taught me concerns precisely the relationship between design and IP. Most designers I work with treat intellectual property as something a lawyer handles after the project is finished. That approach costs companies a great deal of money. The best European firms think about IP during the design process. Which part of the product is distinctive enough to protect. How design registration affects competitive strategy. How to build a portfolio of rights that creates real advantage.
The second thing that gained weight through these three years at EUIPO is sustainability. Sustainability in this competition is not a slogan. It is a hard criterion evaluated through concrete questions about materials, product lifecycle, circularity and ecodesign regulations. Companies with vague answers to those questions are eliminated early. Companies that can show specific data and specific decisions gain a real edge.
This is a criterion I now bring to every project where it applies. Advisory work at the intersection of design, IP strategy and sustainability has become one of the stronger elements of what I offer clients through All Form One. Because it is important that products solve real problems rather than becoming, after a few months, another item to be disposed of.
Taiwan International Student Design Competition. Twenty thousand entries that changed my optimism.
In 2024 I received an invitation to jury TISDC — the world's largest student design competition. That edition received nearly twenty thousand entries from eleven hundred schools in sixty-four countries. A scale impossible to imagine until you sit in front of those lists.
It is a considerable collision with a reality quite different from the one I remember at their age. Not only technically — that is obvious, the tools have changed, the world has turned inside out. The difference is in the way of thinking. Social responsibility in design, which we discuss at conferences, is rarely a natural default for them. Many of these projects are not trying to fix the world, and I had expected and hoped for more of that. Youth has this particular quality of positive naivety that lets us solve problems precisely because we do not yet know they are impossible to solve. That should motivate young designers to engage with serious subjects rather than submitting another phone case with a kitten for competition evaluation. Fortunately there were a few exceptionally aware individuals who were introducing innovations in their own surroundings that bordered on revolution — similar to the kind described in the film "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," which tells the true story of fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba. I recommend it to anyone who has not seen it.
It was because of those few that I emerged from that session more optimistic than I had entered. That is not a trivial statement. I have worked in this industry long enough to remember how narrow our priorities were twenty-odd years ago. We made attractive things, sometimes functional, rarely thinking about their consequences beyond aesthetics and ergonomics. Those few exceptional students whose work I evaluated in 2024 think more broadly, more long-term and more deeply than 99 percent of people their age.
Dobry Wzór. Returning after two decades from the other side of the table.
Dobry Wzór is Poland's oldest design competition. Organized by the Institute of Industrial Design for over seventy years. For a Polish designer it is what the Architecture of the Year award is to an architect. A point of reference you cannot sidestep.
I was a proud laureate several times. Returning in 2024 as a juror, and again in 2025, closed a certain cycle. From a designer whose work was recognized, I became one of those who make decisions about others' work.
This perspective is valuable for a different reason than it might seem. It is not about satisfaction, though that is there. It is about seeing directly how the Polish design market changes year by year. When I was winning in 2010, Polish design was still learning to stand on its own feet after decades of interruption. A few years before that, we were opening one of the first design offices in Poland, though in the first years ninety percent of commissions came from abroad. Products were often derivative, because age and lack of experience did not allow for more. A confident voice comes simply with time and that must always be taken into account when evaluating both oneself and others.
In 2024, when I was judging, I saw something different. Polish companies are today submitting products that are not an attempt to be "European." They simply are European, in the sense that they hold a standard that twenty years ago was international-level. Polish design is finding its own voice, and products winning Dobry Wzór are simultaneously winning iF Gold Awards.
From the perspective of my business work, this is information that changes conversations with clients. Polish companies are today ready for the international level. This is not an aspiration. It is a reality whose evolution I am not only witnessing but actively contributing to.
Central European Creative Awards Advisory Board. The newest role, which works differently.
Since January 2026 I have been sitting on the Advisory Board of the Central European Creative Awards — an initiative whose purpose is building a regional platform for design and creativity in Central Europe. This role differs from all previous ones in one key respect. Here you do not evaluate individual projects. Here you build the context in which those projects can exist.
Central Europe is undervalued in global design, partly because even as a place on the map it is only recently asserting itself. Somewhere between western Europe and eastern Europe lies a mass of other Europe that is finally beginning to demand attention loudly. We have excellent designers and interesting companies from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states. We have our own cultural perspective shaped by our history and by how the market developed here after 1989. What we are missing is a single global platform that shows that perspective to the world.
CECA is that tool in construction, and after its first edition — which in my assessment was one of the best inaugural editions I have seen — it is heading in exactly the right direction. Work on the Advisory Board also means participating in decisions about which disciplines to promote, what standards to introduce, how to build the region's reputation so that in five years Central European design holds a stronger position than it does today.
This role is a natural extension of everything I have done until now. After years as a juror in international competitions, after founding and running my own brands, after hundreds of projects for Polish and international clients delivered as studio director and as an independent practitioner — involvement in building regional creative infrastructure is what gives me an even better vantage point on the long-term effects of this work.
What ten jury terms give a practitioner. The key conclusions.
After these years spent on both sides of the jury table, I have knowledge that influences every day how I design and how I advise clients, particularly in the context of submitting products to competitions.
First. The evaluation criteria are very similar across all serious international competitions. Aesthetics. Usability. Innovation. Quality of execution. Brand consistency. Sustainability. Social impact. The differences lie in the weighting of individual criteria and how they are measured — at EUIPO IP management quality is added, at iF brand strategy and consistency of execution carry more weight, at TISDC cultural context. But the foundation is the same. If you understand that foundation, you understand what "good product" means in the international sense of the word.
Second. Awards are not given for "nice forms." They are given for effective solutions to real problems. This is a principle visible across all competitions I have participated in. I myself am strongly human-centered in my approach, and what matters enormously to me is that the list of problems to solve is the longest list in the brief. I look at the user, at the usage context, at real consequences. Aesthetics are important, of course, but they are a tool, not a goal.
Third. Optimization and quality of execution are always as important to me as the idea itself. Whether the design team delivered on the brief. Whether the product on the market matches what the renders promised. Whether five parts became three, and ten screws became four. Whether the details are refined. Whether the execution reveals no sign of rushing. These things are visible immediately to anyone with an eye trained by hundreds of their own projects. They cannot be hidden from an experienced juror, and increasingly not from an experienced user.
Fourth. Communication is as important as the product. Jurors do not have time to read a thousand beautiful words in a description. What counts is the first impression and the experienced, competent eye of the juror. The first photograph. The first three sentences of the description. The first thirty seconds of contact with the product. That decides whether the product gets a chance at serious discussion at all. Everything else comes later.
Fifth, and most important. Every jury session is a compression of several months of normal design work. You see hundreds of solutions you would never have invented yourself. You hear experienced people from different cultures and disciplines look at the same products and see different things. Those discussions, their rhythm, the questions that arise — all of it stays in your head and returns when you are at your own work.
After ten sessions I have something that is hard to describe briefly. I know what works internationally. I know why some good projects lose to worse ones. I know what a project with a real shot at an award looks like, and what a project that merely aspires looks like. Above all I know that what separates outstanding products from good ones is not one factor. It is a collection of dozens of subtle decisions, all pointing in the right direction, assembling into a coherent whole that cannot be broken down into simple rules.
This knowledge is part of what my clients get. Not just design. Not just engineering. Not just brand strategy and its big picture. Also the perspective that comes only from having been on both sides of design competitions — that a good product is one whose purpose and meaning need no explanation. It is the lens through which I look at every project I take on today, my own or a client's.
— Boni
✍️ About the author: Michał "Boni" Bonikowski is an industrial designer, brand builder and entrepreneur based in Warsaw. CEO of All Form One, an independent creative enterprise. Over 25 years and 400+ products across medical devices, consumer electronics, aviation and industrial sectors. iF Gold Award 2014 — first Polish winner. Red Dot 2021. DesignEuropa Finalist 2021. Juror for iF Design Award, ADC Annual Awards, DesignEuropa EUIPO, Dobry Wzór and Taiwan International Student Design Competition. Member of the Advisory Board, Central European Creative Awards.