Since 1997 the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum has honored the best in American design with the National Design Awards, for which projects are submitted by and voted upon by design professionals. This year, a new category was added—The People’s Design Award—giving the general public an opportunity to express their views on what constitutes the best of design.

• Completely appropriate for the differing user skills of a huge audience, the interface for the submission and voting process was inviting and user-friendly. The result: 10 percent of visitors made nominations, 90 percent voted and 20 percent made comments.

• The site was launched with a “bad word filter,” to catch “inappropriate” user comments and nominations. But because it put a noticeable load on the server and affected performance, the original list, supplied by Cooper-Hewitt was scaled-back.

• At the height of its use, the site averaged a million hits a week and 4,000 registered users.