This award recognizes the project that embodies the best attributes of engineering design and the engineering profession.  The winning project shall have an outstanding design approach and implementation, excellent system modeling and/or analysis that support the design, comprehensive system testing that verifies system requirements, and a superior presentation of results to Design Day judges.  Team members of the winning project shall present themselves professionally and clearly demonstrate engineering knowledge of the design.  The winning project shall clearly be the best project at Design Day.

While several designs may meet the judging criteria, this award is given to the design that does so the most effectively. The project that receives this award excels in many ways. The design is well thought out and its implementation is of high quality. It accomplishes all key design requirements and is supported by rigorous analysis and testing. Its poster and presentation are professional and easy to understand.

The French philosopher Voltaire is credited with the saying “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” which means “the best is the enemy of the good.” Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the saying “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This award recognizes the design team that best emulates these ideals and resists the temptation to overly complicate the design to yield a clean, simple, elegant, lowest-cost design that simply works well.

This award recognizes the best project related to sustainable, cost-effective and environmentally friendly energy production, distribution or use. Winning projects could focus on developing new energy sources, reducing energy costs, improving efficiency or reducing cost of energy distribution, adapting existing energy distribution methods to better integrate new energy sources, and increasing efficiency of energy use.

Software has become an integral part of the operation, management and control of complex systems comprising mechanical, electrical, and optical elements. This award recognizes the best use of software in a system design to enable task automation, object recognition, system robustness, data collection, or other impressive features that would be difficult to achieve without software. Teams will be judged on the reliability, robustness, maintainability, reusability, originality and testability of software embedded in their designs.

The Systems Engineering perspective is based on systems thinking.  When a system is considered as a combination of system elements, systems thinking acknowledges the primacy of the whole (system) and the primacy of the relation of the interrelationships of the system elements to the whole. This award goes to the team that most robustly addresses all aspects of the project from the systems perspective.

This award recognizes excellence in overall system design in a project that has an aerospace emphasis. Verbal presentations should be well structured to describe effectively the overall system and the specifics of how the team implemented its design project. A key feature of the presentation must be representative data that demonstrate how the system was thoroughly tested. Answers to questions should be direct and demonstrate a high level of team competency about the details of the electronic system for the project. The presentation should demonstrate how all members have contributed to the project to exhibit core values of teamwork and professionalism.

This award recognizes the most innovative use of optoelectronics and optomechanics in a design and is given to the team that demonstrates the most thorough approach to the design and engineering of its optical system. This award recognizes complete understandings of the optical design, system requirements, tolerance analysis, and optical component usage. Important criteria are integration of optics into the overall system, novel use of optical components, creative use of commercial off-the-shelf items, verification of optical components, meeting system requirements, use of standard optical design software, and manufacturability of optical design and components.

This award reflects the quality of the overall verbal and poster presentations. Verbal presentations should be well structured to describe efficiently the overall problem being solved and the specifics of how the team accomplished its design. Answers to questions should be direct and demonstrate mastery of the project. Presenters should speak in a clear and easily audible voice, making good eye contact with the judging pod. The poster board should be visually interesting, and graphically well organized to tell a standalone story of the project.

Innovation may include the novel use of existing components or the creation of entirely new components to meet customer requirements. The most innovative design will not only be a creative solution to a problem but also an effective solution that is well implemented. This award recognizes the team that has created or made use of components in the most innovative way, or demonstrated excellence in the implementation of innovative design in its project, or both.

The Lundin Award recognizes design innovation in the safe and economical extraction of mineral commodities. A key focus for this reward is a written, well-documented mineral resource report, a well-developed mine plan, and an economic model to demonstrate the project's viability. True innovation will illustrate the sustainability of the resource and its relationship with the environment and community. The written report and oral presentations for this project should demonstrate collaborations across the team members' disciplines.

Innovation may include the novel use of existing components or the creation of entirely new components to meet customer requirements. The most innovative design will not only be a creative solution to a problem but also an effective solution that is well implemented. This award recognizes the team that has created or made use of components in the most innovative way, or demonstrated excellence in the implementation of innovative design in its project, or both.

This award honors a student team that has improved or enhanced the quality of life for individuals through the outcome of their project. It recognizes the improved standard of health, comfort, environment, community, and happiness experienced by an individual or group. Projects are judged on the ability to promote the well-being of humans through togetherness and the practicality of the implementation. Teams should be able to effectively communicate their design, express how it will improve lives, describe the current environment or paradigm, and generally speak towards the economic reality of a possible implementation.

Biomedical engineering is a discipline that advances knowledge in engineering, biology and medicine, and improves human health through cross-disciplinary activities that integrate the engineering sciences with biomedical sciences and clinical practice.  This award recognizes the team the has demonstrated excellence and innovation in biomedical engineering design.  It recognizes outside-the-box thinking that pushes boundaries and hands-on approaches to creative solutions. Projects are judged on the elegance and creativity of the technical solutions and their implementation. Teams should be able to communicate effectively their design and the processes they use for creativity.

This award goes to the team that best considers the needs of the End User/Client. The team should demonstrate that they considered the End User's needs throughout the design process. The team should have a list of End User concerns and show how they addressed them. Many times, a physical prototype is created to understand and study the fit, form and function of the device or system and usability testing is conducted with a sample group of End Users to validate or improve the design. Teams are judged on the appropriateness of the prototyping used, how effectively prototyping is used to improve the design, and how well the needs of End Users are considered. Prototypes can be made using rapid fabrication technology, traditional manufacturing, or can be hand built.

Successful implementation of any innovative design requires that all members of the design and production team communicate effectively. Design intent must be communicated from the design activity to the rest of the team using design documentation with a clear map for others to reproduce the design based on documentation only. The mechanical portion of the design is evaluated on the use of drawings with geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, solids models, illustrations and presentations that can be used to manufacture and inspect design hardware. Software and other systems are evaluated on the use of documentation that clearly and fully describes the system and illustrates the approach to testing.

This award recognizes the single-discipline design team that best demonstrates external team collaboration. Like real-world problems, senior design projects require skills from multiple sources and students should learn the value of leveraging the strength of a diverse team as well as seeking out external guidance and support to succeed. These skills are foundational to a successful engineering career.

This award recognizes the UAS project with the highest quality of design and construction that succeeded in, or made a good attempt to, achieve the sponsor objectives.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. IEEE is a leading developer of international standards that underpin many of today's telecommunications, information technology, and power-generation products and services. This award recognizes the team that best shows the standards used in their project and how the use of those standards facilitated or improved their overall design and/or its performance outcome.

The Mensch Prize for Best Use of Embedded Intelligence recognizes the engineering innovation team that best integrates embedded intelligence into a potential commercial product. Specifically, the award will be granted to a student team that has built a smart connected prototype that may have a commercial market. Embedded Intelligence is characterized as the ability of a product to sense, process, communicate, and actuate (SPCA) based upon information gained from an understanding of both itself and others and for the benefit of many. Preference will be given to designs with SPCA capabilities that can demonstrably surpass human abilities to perform the same function.

This award recognizes the interdisciplinary team that creates the best video telling the project story. The video must capture the sponsor's need, the process the team followed to develop the solutions, the final solution including test and evaluation, and how it meets the sponsor's needs.

This award recognizes the team that “thought big” and applied cutting-edge science and technology to make an impactful difference in the world; an enduring principle of LLNL.

Issues and roadblocks always occur during the engineering design process. Although they cause panic and distress, they also represent great opportunities to learn and often lead to designs that would otherwise be impossible to conceive. This award recognizes a team’s ability to learn and to overcome issues or roadblocks encountered during the design process. The award is judged based on the ingenuity of solutions to problems caused by issues or roadblocks and the features in the final design that contribute to recovery from them.

Processes are an important element of most chemical and environmental engineering projects. And effective design of these processes sets the stage for the success of these projects. This award recognizes the best application of process design and economic principles to a chemical or environmental process. These principles include process synthesis through flow diagrams, material and energy balances, preliminary equipment sizing, and the determination of the economic viability of the project.

This award celebrates pioneering projects that harness cutting-edge technologies to drive innovation in software development. This award will recognize a project that effectively integrates emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, DevOps (or DevSecOps), augmented reality or virtual reality (AR / VR) or other forms of automation and innovation into its software solution. Whether it's revolutionizing user experiences, optimizing business processes, or pushing the boundaries of what's possible in software engineering, this award highlights the transformative impact of embracing emerging technologies in the realm of software development.

This award goes to the team that best uses a physical prototype model to understand and study the fit, form and function of the device or system designed. Teams are judged on the appropriateness of the prototyping technology used, how effectively prototyping is used to improve design, and how effectively the use of prototyping is communicated. Prototypes can be made using rapid fabrication technology, traditional manufacturing, or can be hand built.

The Internet of Things is estimated to currently encompass over 15 billion devices and projected to double in the next 6 years. This award recognizes the team that best integrates modern IoT hardware, networking, data storage, and data analysis in a data acquisition and control system. Data acquisition should involve at least two sensors and a communication protocol while feedback and control should be provided by algorithms, analysis, and actuators. Projects are judged on utilization of IoT devices and connectivity to provide simple, robust, and efficient data acquisition and control to accomplish all or part of the project requirements.

The Fish Out of Water award congratulates students for successfully accomplishing a task that was not in their realm of expertise. The projects for senior design require skills from many disciplines, and students must sometimes learn a new subject or skill in an area outside of their major to help the team succeed. A student who not only learns this new subject or skill, but also uses it to effectively help the team thrive, shows dedication and initiative, traits that will continue to help in an engineering career.

The Social Impact Award recognizes the college engineering capstone project that demonstrates the greatest potential to create positive change or have a significant impact to society. This award honors a team whose project addresses critical social, environmental, or humanitarian challenges through innovative engineering solutions. The winning project exemplifies technical excellence, creativity, and a commitment to improving lives, advancing sustainability, or fostering community well-being. This award celebrates engineering as a force for good, showcasing an engineering solution that not only push technical boundaries but also prioritize ethical responsibility and real-world impact.

This award recognizes the project that makes the best use of computer-based simulation or modeling.  The simulation may be the project itself, or a design tool used to model the performance of the project design.  Criteria for this award is based on scope of the simulation, the fidelity of the simulation compared to real-world performance, and the engineering judgement exercised in determining the complexity of the model.

This award is given to the team that designs and builds a system that goes beyond meeting sponsor requirements and best considers usability and manufacturing readiness.  Teams will be judged on manufacturing readiness of the design using the following considerations:

1. Design process considered alternative designs and selected the “best choice” that meets or exceeds all of the sponsor requirements and can be used immediately by the sponsor.
2. Design considered producibility, ease of assembly, and cost.
3. Design showed consideration for reliability and maintainability issues while in the design/model/prototype phases as well as build phases.
4. Design considered user operation and included operator instructions.
5. Design technical data package was complete.

Some designs are intuitive.  But sometimes, application of basic physics results in a design that might - without an understanding of the underlying principals - be rejected or even laughed at. This award recognizes a design that only an engineer could love.

This award is given to the team whose design incorporates the most innovative manufacturing method addressing reduced carbon emissions.  Projects could include introducing a new technique for manufacturing or an innovative use of an existing technique that reduces the cost and improves the quality of a product while reducing carbon footprint.

This award recognizes students who best exemplify teamwork skills, including the ability to work cooperatively with others to produce high-quality work, to take the initiative, to support and respect the opinions of fellow team members, to give and receive feedback, to demonstrate effective leadership, to keep their team focused, and to elevate the work of their fellow team members. Nominees for this award are selected by their teammates.