Design Challenge Rules

Basic Rules

1. The challenge is free, and open to anyone over the age of twelve who successfully completes all the application steps. 
2. Contestants  work as a team and must collaborate (this is a design challenge about collective intelligence, after all). 
3. You must propose a new method, tool or technology that improves the way we work together in an important arena of human endeavor, and provide an interactive demo.
4. All the information in your submission is under a Creative Commons Attribution license detailed at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Detailed Steps for Entrants

1)    If you haven't already joined the Tech Virtual website please create a profile.
2)    Create a new project and look for team members, or ask to join the team working on an existing one.  Each project team must have at least two members.
3)    Briefly state your project's Big Idea, and describe it in enough detail that others can understand it.
4)    Collaboratively work out the project details, demo and plan for impact (or business plan) together with your other team members
5)    Once you have completed steps 1-5, create your demo.  You may choose to realize your demo physically, in software or on the Web, but before judging it must be modeled at The Tech Virtual area in Second Life.  Prototyping in Second Life is especially helpful to work out the user interaction.  This, Tech Virtual website and The Tech's Second Life location (http://tinyurl.com/TheTech2) provide all the necessary tools and resources for developing your entry description and prototyping an interactive demo that explains it.  Members of The Tech Virtual community are available to help with building and scripting in the virtual world.

Specific guidelines for the interactive demo

1.    The demo should illustrate your concept, in a way that makes it meaningful and accessible to a lay person.
2.    Your demo should be inspiring.  It should make visitors realize that the tools to make a better world are not out of reach, but all around us.   The demo must be interactive, and it should not rely on extensive written documentation for visitors to understand it.
3.    It should be educational.  It should convey an understanding of
a)    how your innovation actually works,
b)    what problems it addresses, and
c)    how it provides a solution to that problem.
4.    If there is a human interest story linking your idea to a local community (involves local companies, solves a local problem, local uses for the technology, local individuals involved, etc.), that is a plus.
5.    It must be feasible to build your demo in a science and technology center.
6.    Your exhibit concept must be licensed under Creative Commons (you agreed to this when creating the entry).

Now go to the projects page and start a new demo project or join an existing one.