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IxDA is a community of doers and makers, so if you’ve followed previous Awards cycles and thought to yourself, “I’d love to help make the Awards program even better,” this is your chance to step into a leadership role.

About the Interaction Awards

Founded in 2010 and first presented in 2012, the annual Interaction Awards celebrate design thought leadership and innovation around the globe. Each year, Award recipients comprise a showcase demonstrating how interaction design impacts and improves human lives.

Why the Interaction Awards matter

Interaction design is about people: how people interact with each other, and how people interact with the world around them. The Interaction Awards celebrate the work done by interaction designers every day, to create meaningful relationships between people and the products and services that they use. The Awards recognize and promote outstanding works across domains, platforms, and cultures, highlighting interaction design from around the world.

Through the work celebrated by the Interaction Awards, IxDA is building a learning library of interaction design case studies and advancing our mission to demonstrate how interaction design can be applied to improve our human condition.

The Awards Chair role

To be successful, you’ll need to be comfortable leading with charismatic authority. Your team will be recruited from the IxDA community and are 100% volunteers.

Key accountabilities in this role are:

Leadership and strategic development

• Establish the vision and direction of the Awards for the current cycle that evolves the program in service of IxDA’s strategic objectives
• Identify and solicit strategic partnerships to advance awareness of the Awards
• Develop and implement a communications and outreach plan to promote the Awards’ and solicit entries for the current cycle
• Identify and select a jury chair and invite the international jury panel
• Form and steward a peer review panel from the IxDA community
• Facilitate and manage the peer review and jury process
• Develop and deliver the 2024 Interaction Awards ceremony

Project management

• Recruit and manage a diverse, global team of volunteers to execute all aspects of the Awards program, including a co-chair and workstream leads
• Manage the project budget in collaboration with the IxDA Executive Director
• Manage sponsorship recognition and fulfillment throughout the Awards cycle
• Manage the fulfillment program for all levels of Awards recognition
• Participate in the vendor selection process to produce the Awards ceremony
• Document the Awards cycle work, handoff assets to the next cycle’s team

The Awards Chair is a servant leadership opportunity, accountable to the IxDA community through our Executive Director and Board of Directors.

Key dates

• 29 May: Open Call for Candidates
• 30 Jun: Close Call for Candidates
• 17 Jul: Onboard new lead

Apply to lead

Do you see yourself as the next Interaction Awards Chair? Tell us a little about yourself, your involvement in IxDA, and your experience with the development or delivery of an Awards program.

Submit your application by 30 June 2023.

Starting with a shortlist created by our Community Peer Review Panel, and then narrowed down by our international jury to category finalists and, ultimately, these winners, this year’s Interaction Awards represent a unique snapshot of the state of Interaction Design.  

The winners emerged from 68 short-listed projects including first-time appearances from student teams all the way through to enterprise-level projects with global adoption. With projects from Australia, India, China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the global potential of Interaction Design is apparent.

The domains covered hint at areas of focus from the last two years — empowering users to manage data, make sustainable decisions, increase accessibility, and the role that AI may play across several sectors. 

2023 Interaction Awards Winners

Best in Category: Connecting

Jammies: Musical Instruments designed for People Living With Dementia

Imperial College London, United Kingdom (Concept / Student)

Jammies are a set of musical instruments designed to improve the quality of life for people living with mild to moderate Dementia by empowering them to reminisce, improvise and jam along to music that is of personal value to them without assuming any prior musical ability or knowledge. 

Best in Category: Disrupting

Connected AEDs and the Future of Emergency Response

NewDealDesign, United States (Production / Professional)

The Avive Connect AED™ sets a new standard for what should be expected of an AED— direct yet approachable experience during treatment, seamless transfer of valuable incident data to 911, EMS, and medical professionals at the right time, and automated remote monitoring to ensure your fleet of devices is ready to save a life.

Best in Category: Empowering

Engaging men for better family health outcomes

Dalberg, India (Production / Professional)

Engaging men in family planning and nutrition programming provides an opportunity to move towards better health and gender outcomes. To meet this goal, we designed two innovative programs in rural Bihar, India, using Human-centered Design (HCD) research, co-creation and prototype testing, grounded in behavioral science approaches.

Best in Category: Engaging

Little Signals

Google LLC, United States (Concept / Professional)

Little Signals, a series of interaction experiments, explores new behaviors for technology in our daily lives. The objects in the series signal for attention with different sensorial cues like a waft of air, a soft shadow, or an ambient sound. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and make them responsive to changing surroundings and needs.

Best in Category: Expressing

Mood Board Search – Enabling AI-powered Creative Expression

Nord Projects, United Kingdom (Concept / Professional)

Advances in computer vision and natural language AI continue to unlock new ways to explore the billions of images across our devices, websites, and the public domain. However, it remains difficult to express subjective concepts, such as visual tones (‘vibrant’) or moods (‘eclectic’) to current systems, where visual interpretation is shaped by culture and community and is personal to the individual.

‍Best in Category: Optimizing

Annalise Enterprise

Annalise-AI Pty Ltd, Australia (Production / Professional)

Medical imaging (radiology) has long been a critical diagnostic tool, playing an ever-growing role in establishing which treatment approach best serves each patient. 

The ongoing growth in the sheer number of medical images challenges radiologists and healthcare providers to read more scans during each workday, all while maintaining the accuracy, quality, and completeness of their results. The result? Well-resourced medical systems face significant imaging backlogs. Under-resourced systems with low clinician-to-patient ratios may miss opportunities for early disease detection. 

‍Best Student‍

DOLL-SITTER

Hunan University, China (Concept / Student)

DOLL-SITTER is a toy set of pop-up smart books and application for sex education for children aged 5-8, using dolls that play the role of body organs and children played as their protectors. Through the interaction of dolls and smart pop-up books, children can learn about sex education, establish life scenes, and discuss with their parents the sex education issues in the “difficult to speak” life. 

‍Best Concept

Little Signals

Google LLC, United States (Concept / Professional)

Little Signals, a series of interaction experiments, explores new behaviors for technology in our daily lives. The objects in the series signal for attention with different sensorial cues like a waft of air, a soft shadow, or an ambient sound. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and make them responsive to changing surroundings and needs.

‍People’s Choice

Carbon Insights: Empowering consumers to make more sustainable decisions

Rabobank, Netherlands (Production / Professional)

Carbon Insights helps people to learn about the CO2 impact of their purchases based on payment data and a personal profile. In addition, we give educational tips on how to lower your carbon footprint. By applying the lean startup method, we were able to accelerate innovation and be the first Dutch bank to make this available within the consumer banking app.

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Best in Show

Little Signals

Google LLC, United States  (Concept / Professional)

Little Signals, a series of interaction experiments, explores new behaviors for technology in our daily lives. The objects in the series signal for attention with different sensorial cues like a waft of air, a soft shadow, or an ambient sound. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and make them responsive to changing surroundings and needs.

Our jury's comments in selecting Little Signals for this recognition:

'It’s exceptionally well executed and embodies the essence of interaction design.'

'Little Signals is also modular enough to be applied to a myriad of use scenarios.'

Congratulations to all of our 2023 honorees. We appreciate the work of our peer reviewers and international jury, who volunteered their time in reviewing submissions and selecting this year's winners.

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The 2024 Interaction Awards will open for submissions in July.

We planned to announce our Interaction Awards winners today, but our jury needs a little more time to make this year’s final selections.

The team is busy evaluating this year’s finalists and considering feedback from the community to confirm our decisions. The good news is that People’s Choice voting remains open through 18 May, so you have more time to participate in selecting this year’s honoree in the only category chosen by you – the community!  

Our new publication date is 19 May. Watch this space for news!

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Raise a glass to our Finalists!

After hard work by our Peer Reviewers and thorough discussion by our 2023 jury, we’re proud to announce the 24 projects representing 10 countries that make up our 2023 Interaction Awards Finalists.

Our jury selected these submissions from a pool of 68 projects from more than 20 countries for recognition.

Connecting

Facilitating communication between people and communities

• The Colour of Resilience
• Everwhite
• DOLL-SITTER
• Oasis
• Jammies: Musical Instruments designed for People Living With Dementia

Disrupting

Re-imagining existing systems via new behaviors, usages, or markets

• Connected AEDs and the future of Emergency Response
• Carbon Insights: Empowering consumers to make more sustainable decisions
• IBM Watson Orchestrate
• CBDCs for SDGs
• FiDO / enhancing trust between driver and AI system in semi-autonomous vehicles

Empowering

Helping people to do things they otherwise couldn’t do

• Engaging men for better family health outcomes
• Equimetrics V-PRO – Smarter Equine Monitoring
• TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch

Engaging

Capturing attention, creating delight, and delivering meaning

• Alta Quanto: Design for disaster preparedness
• HSBC Accessibility Hub
• Heal Tutu–A family interactive product that educates about emergency prevention
• Little Signals

Expressing

Enabling self-expression and/or creativity

• Making Material You
• Mood Board Search – Enabling AI-powered Creative Expression
• PIIQ

Optimizing

Making daily activities more efficient

• Whome: Finding new homes for pre-loved items
• GardenSpace with Eden
• The Sound of Safety – Philips 2021 alarm sounds
• Annalise Enterprise

Join us on 6 May

We’ll celebrate our winners on 6 May with an online announcement. Don’t forget to cast your vote for the People’s Choice Award too!

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Sami is a strategic designer, consultant, and creative leader working at the intersection of systems, foresight, and design. His talent lies in the combination of fast conceptual thinking and visualization turning ambiguous problems to clear solutions and systems while remaining grounded in clear business drivers.

Sami has been working on interaction design since 1997 and founded his first company already in 2001. Before founding Nordkapp in 2007 he worked at Nokia Design’s global Insight & Innovation team between Helsinki, London, and Los Angeles.

During his career, Sami has worked with clients such as Google, ING Group, Kone, Nokia, Microsoft,  Oura, Beddit (exited to Apple), Umbra (exited to Amazon), Swappie, and City of Helsinki.

Sami’s work has earned several patents and 40-ish awards in national and international competitions, along with several highly esteemed jury duties in Finland and abroad. He also has over a decade’s worth of teaching experience at the Aalto University School of Business and over 100 lectures and talks worldwide.

Currently, he serves as a director on IxDA’s global board of directors.

Linkedin | Twitter

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Dali is Head of UX for Google Trust and Safety, where she leads a global and cross-disciplinary team to craft end-to-end experiences that promote digital safety.

She brings deep expertise of user-centric design by conducting research across 10+ countries, creating impactful foundational design programs, and being an educator, in particular supporting the growth of UX in Latin America.

She has collaborated and partnered with companies such as TomTom, Boeing, Toyota, Ford, and Intel to design experiences for a wide range of products including airplanes, autonomous vehicles, VR, and phones.

Dali holds a doctoral degree in user-system interaction from the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and a master’s degree in human factors and systems from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, USA.

Linkedin | Twitter

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