Many of you attended our Synergy Awards the other day. There’s also the Emmys, the Tonys, the Oscars, and tons of others. Recognizing accomplishments is a way to point out to the rest of the world,“Hey, here’s someone that’s doing it right!”

Not all awards are recognition for doing things right, however. Most of us are familiar with Texas Monthly’s Bum Steer Awards recognizing outstanding bone-headedness throughout the state. Well, a few years back, a friend and I created the Impala Awards. While we never had a formal ceremony, and were unwilling to actually spend money on an award, we were never the less on the lookout for nominees.

The Impala Awards were created to recognize complete ineptitude in design and in great tradition, we named the award after its first recipient, the Chevrolet Impala – not the recent redesign, but the one from the late eighties with the aerodynamics of a hippopotamus. What were those designers thinking?

The awards are not limited to car design. Other recipients have included such outstanding examples as business cards with type too small to read, “dynamic” books that make the reader thumb through the book to find the next page and companies who have the instruction manuals for their products written in the language of the non-English speaking country which produced their product. I still can’t set my VCR clock.

I think the most flagrant abuse of design is by product packaging designers. These are the folks who make those plastic coffins my new cell phone came in, the one that requires a machete to cut through, the plastic so tough that it cut my fingers while struggling to pull it apart with my foot on one end and both hands prying the other apart. These are also the good people who package an item the size of a pencil into a cardboard box so it will match all the other oversize packages on the store shelves.

I know that some of this is for “loss prevention.” But the vast majority of this excessive packaging is strictly for marketing. The bigger the box, the more pictures and words can go on it to get my attention.

What troubles me most is the fundamental waste that goes with this packaging attitude. I recently purchased a digital camera. Not only were there massive amounts of plastic and cardboard in the packaging, it seemed most of it was devoid of any markings for recycle-ability or post consumer waste content. Although I have no direct control over the packaging my purchases come in, I can make the difficult choice of not buying products whose packaging is offensively excessive. I’ve even given thought to taking the product out of the packaging at the sales counter and leaving all the non-product stuff right there in the store.

With the city running out of landfill space and the proposal of charging for “excess curbside refuse” I’m less inclined to pay twice for a product to be packaged and marketed to me.