Averatec laptop skin design contest ends Saturday

Many students add a unique flair to the outsides of their laptop computers with stickers and drawings. Now, the computer company Averatec is offering a way for students to show the world their technological creativity.\nIn the first ever "It's About Me" contest, amateur designers can win Averatec 7100 Series laptops for creating the best "skins," or cases, for the laptops. Voting on the contest Web site, www.createyourcase.com, determines the winners.\nThe contest ends Saturday and is free to enter. Five random registrants, including both design contestants and voters, will also win Voya 300 Series Global Positioning Systems.\nAccording to the contest's Web site, the digital image of the skin, which contestants will upload on the site, can be anything from a picture taken from a camera to a drawing scanned into a computer.\nCreating a laptop skin falls under a field of informatics known as interaction design, said Eli Blevis, assistant professor of informatics at IU.\n"Interaction design is the new meaning of human-computer interaction which is properly a subdiscipline of computer science," Blevis said. "(It) includes influences from cognitive science design and education, as well as others."\nAfter the image is uploaded to the Web site, people may vote for it an unlimited number of times, incorporating a marketing aspect of the contest. Though not a requirement, Averatec strongly suggests contestants put up information about how to vote for their image on other personal Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.\nTo win the contest, one would need to be well-rounded, said Darek Connole, an Averatec spokesperson for the contest.\n"(You'd need) a culmination of different artistic skills, and you would have to have a lot of friends or be good at social marketing," Connole said.\nAveratec's Director of Product Placement Bret Berg said he knows creativity in college kids can often lead to rather "racy" content. Berg is not discouraging this content, but asks that students keep everything clean and legal and is not allowing copyright or trademark infringement.\nThe contest is open to anyone over the age of 18, and more than 2,000 entries have been submitted.\nSo far, the gallery of entries includes logos of universities, pictures of island getaways and an image of a Furby smoking marijuana. \nBerg said he allowed the Furby picture in the contest because he didn't find it offensive. However, he did disqualify pictures of 9/11 because they weren't very creative and were too offensive for the contest's standards.\nAll registrants for the contest, whether they enter a skin or simply vote for one, enter a drawing for which five random people will win a Voya 350 Series Portable GPS system from Averatec. The GPS system has a touch-and-go screen with optional stylus, has 1.6 million locations and can be mounted in a car or fit in a pocket.\n"The optional stylus with the GPS system is nice," Connole said, "because I don't know about you, but I have fat nubs for fingers."\nBerg says the contest's goal is to get Averatec known among consumers in a way that encourages creativity in college students.\nThis creativity can lead to careers in the future, Blevis said.\n"There are many jobs are available in this field," he said. "In fact, a bunch of the design for computer works is done here (in the United States)"