The Industrial Design Excellence Awards, or IDEA, are a way of recognising designs that will help our quality of life or the economy in one way or another. From the ISDA:
Winning the IDEA is a distinction like no other that brands your design as the very best in the business, among your peers, among your clients, among consumers around the world.
Businessweek has a list of all the items receiving an award this year.

There's everything from a Self-propelled Compost Turner to the Decru DataFort.

A few consumer computing products that found their way onto the awards list include the much talked about Mac Mini - a product that got a lot of hype at launch, and is receiving flattery through imitation now. There's also Netgear's rather sexy Platinum II, which while looking good, cut production costs as it consists of fewer parts.

Some questionable items made it on the list too. How in Gordon Freeman's name did the ASUS Vento case get on that list? It's not a computer... it's a vacuum cleaner!

I'll stop now, because there's 158 pages to go through, but if you make a start now, you should be done later this evening.