Design competitions
simply organised

Competition Cloud is an easy-to-use service to host building and urban design competitions online.

Main stages of organising a design competition

👤 Involves

■ Project owner
■ Builder
■ Planner

⚙️ Process

This stage is part of your processes and completes before the competition program creation starts.

We can consult you on choosing the right competition type.

📣 Concludes

Decision for the competition type, budget and timetable.

👤 Involves

■ Project owners reps
■ Competition specialist (consultant)
■ Competition committee
■ Architect reps
■ Other specialists (traffic, landscaping…)
■ Secretary of the competition (staff, consult etc.)

⚙️ Process

This stage is part of your processes and completes before the competition period starts.

We can consult you on creation of the competition program and acquisition and refinery of the initial site data.

📣 Concludes

Approval of the competition program.

Including the specification and source material collection of the design challenge for the competition participants.

👤 Involves

■ Competitors
■ Secretary
■ Jury

⚙️ System : Competition Cloud

■ Competition website (info, timetable, downloadable materials)
■ Questions & answers
■ Submitting of proposals
■ Proposal qualification

📣 Concludes

Qualification approval of proposal.

📅 Duration : 2 - 5 months

Competition Website

A proper competition deserves a dedicated website gathering the relevant information and advertising the challenge. Well designed site is easy and pleasant to use and thus serves the needs of both participants and the organiser.

Standard web site version delivers the core information of competition purpose, timeline, rules, materials and up to date competition status news section. It also acts as the platform or link to the possible extra features like Questions & Answers section, Submission portal and 3D city model interface.

Competition website standard version includes following features on a fast cloud infrastructure and responsive design:

  • Main page gathering all relevant key information of the competition
  • Downloads section gathering all competition materials for quick and easy pickup
  • Q&A section for questions and answers (turn around process for customer)

Website has also cover pages for these additional services of further competition stages:

  • Submit page with countdown timer for returning of the proposals (requires Tool / Submit module)
  • Gallery page for public citizen evaluation and commenting of the proposals (requires Tool / Gallery & Commenting module)
  • Awards page for announcing the winners

  • optional modules:

  • 3D city model interface.

Questions & Answers

Typically competition participants are let to ask questions during the competition. This module makes it a breeze to setup the Q&A automation for your competition.

You will define when the questions period starts and ends and also define when the answers will be published.

System is an easy to you no registration needed "submit a question" module. Answers will be published on time via the same module which can be as an individual page or an embed element in another page.

Submitting of Proposals

Competition proposal submission is a critical feature. Participants may invest a vast amount of effort on creation of their entries. Information receiving system must be secure, reliable, anonymity able and easy to operate.

Our cloud service portal for proposal submission is an easy to understand, informative and secure web page where participants can leave in their entries gradually document by document until the submission deadline automatically registers the submitted content. This approach allows incremental updates to the already uploaded content until the deadline giving the peace of mind for the participants of having at least the first versions already set for submission well before the deadline.

Easy to use interface includes for example:

  • High anonymity logic of proposal author
  • Live clock running for the deadline.
  • Visual submission content form
  • Action feedback
  • Submission certificate
  • Submission history

    NOTE! Requires purchase of a data module.

Proposal Qualification

The competition jury will get to qualify the received proposals when the participation deadline has been reached.

Jury will check if the received proposal qualifies according to the competition rules. Missing information or revealed author identity in an anonymous competition may lead to disqualification.

Qualified proposals will move to the judging period where the jury tags, evaluates, reviews, rates and ranks the proposals.

👤 Involves

■ Jury
■ Technical committee (sometimes)
■ Opinions of professionals
■ Publishing proposals to the public

⚙️ System : Competition Cloud

■ Data management
■ Collaborative Review
■ Evaluation Work
■ Jury Chat
■ Proposal PDF Page Cards
■ Public Online Gallery
■ Submitting of proposals

📣 Concludes

Jury report, competition solution.

📅 Single phase : 2 - 5 months
📅 Two phase : 5 - 9 months

Data Management

Centralised data management is the obvious core of the Competition Cloud service. Every project needs this data module to be able to process all the data involved in a competition.

Powerful visual engine as direct part of the data core enables fast and smooth browsing of gigabytes of pre-optimised visual data on standard browsers. This fluency makes the difference to PDF based workflows where file browsing and opening may take tens or hundreds of times more on each proposal board.

Data Management module is responsible for example:

  • Managing the user access and user rights
  • Displaying the visual content, list views and table views
  • Storing the filtering and rating data, notes, description and review text
  • Managing the multi-screen use scenarios
  • Providing the necessary data context for add-on modules

Collaborative Review

Collaborative Review is an essential feature for creating the evaluation report of each proposal. Common writing document enables accurate and seamless jointly performed reviewing which is way faster form of reaching the unified opinion and statement than other methods. Flexible initial working individually at own phase 24/7 kick starts the evaluation while the later stages finalise and consolidate the critics into a correct length quality chapters ready for proof read and publishing.

  • fluent editor with style options
  • version backup via service provider

    NOTE! Requires purchase of a data module.

Evaluation Work

A typical large competition may receive hundreds of proposals. Writing the review text of each proposal would be lot of work for the jury who eventually should focus on the top proposals. Evaluation module helps the organiser by allowing a quick rating of set features. And instead of just plain numeric grade the system rather draws profile curves to illustrate the pros and cons of each proposal per given trait.

Individual per judge profiles can be analysed parallel to the average profile. This may reveal cases where opinions have stronger spread and may need further common discussion.

Evaluation graphic profiles are shown on interface per proposal and they can be seen also on a list view and printable PDF pages which is useful for more efficient publishing of the non-winning entries.

Jury Chat

Fast proposal commenting and chatting help the jury in the early phases of proposal sorting.

If public commentary is enabled and part of the competition results evaluation then those public comments are next to the chat and chat on the other hand is next to the more final collaborative review text writing feature. This way the flow of information all the way from public opinion via judges individual opinions has the channel to the final evaluation and review.

Chat module when purchased will be instantly in use for all signed in users.

Proposal PDF Page Cards

Evaluation minutes is the key document closing the competition. At large proposal volumes the overhead of creating the document may grow big.

PDF Page Cards module takes the pain off by simply combining the entry boards, the review text and summary of it into a ready to be published pages of Evaluation minutes. If the graphical rating profile has been in use, then it can be also part of the published review per each proposal.

Module cost includes customer logo placement, layout setup, and two language versions. Layouts can be one or two page setups.

Public Online Gallery

Citizens are keen to know how the new ideas and plans regarding their neighbourhood look. Online Gallery is an easy to use browser based visual tool to skim through the proposals or study them carefully detail by detail. Service is provided from a fast CDN network for best possible end user experience.

Typical public content includes the competition proposal boards, description summary and actual text, numeric data regarding the proposal key features and in some case also other documentation. All of that will be published in a single interface as pan & zoomable visual content, and list and table views.

Online Gallery is easy to share, link or embed into an existing web page.

Public Commentary

Urban idea and design competitions seek new solutions to evolving environments. Citizens are the experts of their own living hood. Competition proposals published in Public Gallery can be commented by Public Commentary module right in the context of competition proposal boards.

Public commentary can be mirrored on the judging interface so that the jury members can easily see what kind of public discussion and how much of it has happened per each proposal.

Commentary module supports currently Kerrokantasi API connection which means that any Kerrokantasi site (competition) can be linked to Competition Cloud competiton. Additionally, CC has it's own commenting interface which work in sync with the Public Gallery module.

👤 Involves

■ Competitors
■ Secretary
■ Jury
■ Media
■ Public audience

⚙️ Process

This stage is part of your processes and concludes your competition.

We can consult you on price giving ceremony. Website with winner information and visual proposal gallery are included in the solution.

📣 Concludes

The result of the competition.

Next step: direct procurement of the detail design and construction.

Hybrid meetings

Bigroom working

Fast learning curve

Fast visual browsing

Clarity

Browser application

Multi-screen support

All data in one place

Smooth use on 4G / 5G

Citizen inclusion

3D models on cloud

24/7 cloud solution

Remote working

Competition Cloud for you:‍