Just some food for thought: there were 262 entries in the competition to design the visual identity for COP 15, the international UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2009.

My conservative guess is that an average of 25 hours has been used to produce each design proposal for the competition, which revealed the winner this week. That totals 6550 hours.

For the climate CO2 geeks: computers and light for one workstation uses about 500-600 W/hour. That’s 3.275 KWh, equalling approx. 3 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

This may not do away with all of the Antarctic. But if what they want from the conference is more awareness about cutting our power consumption, there may have been more responsible ways of getting the message across.

For the rest of us: one designer hour is maybe worth an average EUR 75. That equals EUR 491.250,- (DKK 3.7 mio - one kindergarden yearly budget) of our little country’s economy spent on producing one winning proposal. There may be more responsible ways of treating the fragile Danish design business. And maybe even better examples to set…

We didn’t win (you may have guessed, we actually never do:-), but personally I oppose public competitions. It’s the least professional way to choose a partner for a long large-scale project and it’s such a waste of time for all the designers that didn’t win. And more often than not - time is what we sell.