IxDAwards
News

Hello!

The Interaction Awards team is busy preparing for our second annual Awards, aiming for a 17 July 2012 call for submissions. So, if you, or people you know, are interested in submitting this year, here’s your cue to start thinking about some of this year’s examples of excellent interaction design. For inspiration, check out last year’s winning projects, and our video profiles from last year’s awards.

We’ve got a running start with a great group of jurors, volunteer chairs, leads and supporters who will officially be announced on Tuesday, 17 July. In addition to awards in our six categories — optimizing, engaging, empowering, expressing, connecting, and disrupting, this year we will introduce a new special recognition award. More details to come when we launch the new version of awards.ixda.org, announcing all you’ll need to know to submit!

If you’re interested in supporting the awards here are a few ways you can help:

Call for global volunteers: Moka Pantages and Virginia Cagwin, our volunteer marketing communications leads, are busy building a global network of volunteers to help with regional media outreach and marketing. If you’re interested, please contact me and I’ll put you in touch with them.

Call for editorial pieces: We’ve got a strong media partnership program this year, as well as high hopes for the Awards blog and we invite you to contribute. If you’re interested in writing about topics in interaction design, write a short paragraph about what you’d like to write and we’ll happily pitch it to our media partners and/or our blog content editors.

Help us us make this year’s Interaction Awards even better than last year. Enter your work and help us spread the word! Again, we’re opening up for submissions 17 July and closing Monday, 24 September. The summer will fly by, so start thinking about those submissions now.

Cheers,
Interaction Awards Team

We’re honored to announce our inaugural annual Interaction Award winners for 2012!

Tonight we celebrated twenty-six winning projects from all over the world at an Awards Ceremony and Party sponsored by Google at Interaction|12 in Dublin, Ireland. The projects, ranging from applications and games to instrument panels and installations, were picked from over 300 entries from 33 countries,for their excellence in interaction design. San Francisco-based design firm Stimulant and product company LoopLoop and Interaction Cubes by Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida, from Rio de Janeiro was awarded the People’s Choice Award.

“The teams and organizations behind the winning projects deserve our attention and applause,” said Janna DeVylder, president of IxDA. “Great interaction design does not suddenly appear; it’s through a considered design process, understanding of behavior, and clear intent that these projects shine. We are thankful to all that submitted in this first year, providing our judges with a difficult task of narrowing projects and selecting the final winners.”

LoopLoop, the winner of Best in Show, is an interactive music toy created by Stimulant for Sifteo cubes and uses hyper-minimal visuals and rich, smile-making sounds to let anyone make music.

“The best interaction design doesn’t just make things easier to use, it opens up new spaces for play and collaboration to enhance our relationship with the world and each other,” said Jury Chair, Robert Fabricant. “LoopLoop was by far the most addictive entry we reviewed. The judges couldn’t put the little blocks down. That is the true test of great interaction design.”

Interaction Cubes, Winners of the People’s Choice Award, received 394 votes from individuals all over the world who voted for the project during an online poll. By Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida, from Rio de Janiero, Interaction Cubes brings the Periodic Table to life. Installed as part of a traveling exhibition, the modular aluminum structure contains blocks that represent the various chemical elements.

Top prizes were awarded in the following categories: Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People’s Choice, and Best in Category for six categories. An international jury selected the category award winners, and the People’s Choice Award was chosen by the online community.

And the winners are:

Best in Show

LoopLoop, Stimulant/Sifteo – USA

Best Student

Pas a Pas, Ishac Bertran/CIID – Denmark

Best Concept

Out of the Box, Vitamins – UK

People’s Choice

Interaction Cubes, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida – Brazil

Best in Category, Expressing

LoopLoop, Stimulant/Sifteo – USA

Best in Category, Connecting

Pepsi Refresh Project, HUGE – USA

Best in Category, Disrupting

Ford SmartGauge with EcoGuide, Smart Design – USA

Best in Category, Empowering

ReadyForZero, ReadyForZero – USA

Best in Category, Engaging

Interaction Cubes, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida – Brazil

Best in Category, Optimizing

Appie, IceMobile Agency – Netherlands

Complete list of winners for the 2012 Interaction Awards:

Appie

IceMobile Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Best in Category, Optimizing)

B-Cycle
Crispin, Porter + Bogusky Boulder, USA (Optimizing)

FoodHub: a digital community where local food people
ISITE Design Portland, USA (Connecting)

Ford SmartGauge
Smart Design San Francisco, USA (Best in Category, Disrupting)

Google Art Project
Possible Worldwide New York, USA (Empowering)

HBO GO Mobile Applications
HUGE New York, USA (Engaging)

I want ToBe… Course
ToBe Worldwide Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (Empowering)

Interaction Cubes
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Best in Category, Engaging)

LoopLoop
Stimulant/Sifteo San Francisco, USA (Best in Category, Expressing; Best in Show)

Out of Box Experience – Accu-Chek Aviva

Frontend.com Dublin, Ireland (Optimizing)

Out of the Box
Vitamins London, England (Best Concept)

Pas a Pas
Ishac Bertran/CIID Copenhagen, Denmark (Expressing, Best Student)

Peel
Peel Mountain View, USA (Disrupting)

Pepsi Refresh Project
HUGE New York, USA (Best in Category, Connecting)

Plug-In-Play
Rockwell Group New York, USA (Connecting)

ReadyForZero
ReadyForZero San Francisco, USA (Optimizing)

Spotify Box
Umea Institute of Design Umea, Sweden (Disrupting)

Steps
Art Center College of Design Los Angeles, USA (Connecting)

SWYP: See What You Print

Artefact Seattle, USA (Disrupting)

Teaching Channel
Method San Francisco, USA (Empowering)

The Film Room
R/GA New York, USA (Expressing)

The Waste Land
Touch Press LLP London, England (Disrupting)

University of Oregon Ford Alumni Center
Second Story Interactive Studios Portland, USA (Engaging)

We Remember/ Explore 9/11
Local Projects LLC New York, USA (Engaging)

Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango)
Microsoft Seattle, USA (Connecting)

Xero
Xero Wellington, New Zealand (Optimizing)

‍

The Interaction Award’s People’s Choice Award is now open for voting!

We are very excited to celebrate the winners of the 2012 Interaction Awards, but there’s one award-winning project left to choose, and we need your help! The Interaction Awards’ People’s Choice voting is now open in an online gallery at http://awards.ixda.org/vote. Every member of IxDA’s online community gets 3 votes for their favorite project from this year’s shortlist.

Unfortunately due to technical problems, you cannot use your existing IxDA.org credentials. You must register to the Interaction Awards site specifically.

Visit the gallery now, review the entries, and cast your votes today. Then spread the word and promote your favorite projects before voting closes on February 3rd at 12pm GMT.

The winner of the People’s Choice Award will be announced at the Interaction Awards Celebration on Friday, 3 February, at Interaction 12 in Dublin. We hope to see you there!

We are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2012 Interaction Awards!

Three weeks ago the inaugural Interaction Awards Jury met in New York City to review all of the shortlisted entries and choose the best examples of interaction design for 2012. It was a daunting task, but our amazing Jury was up to the challenge. The quality of all of the projects was very high, but the following 26 stood out for recognition as finalists:

Optimizing
Making daily activities more efficient.

• Appie, IceMobile Agency
• B-Cycle, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky
• Out of Box Experience – Accu-Chek Aviva, Frontend.com
• Xero, Xero

Engaging
Capturing attention, creating delight and delivering meaning.

• HBO GO Mobile Applications, HUGE
• Interaction Cubes, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida
• University of Oregon Ford Alumni Center, Second Story Interactive Studios
• We Remember/ Explore 9/11, Local Projects LLC

Empowering
Enabling people to go beyond their limits.

• Google Art Project, Possible Worldwide
• I want ToBe… Course, ToBe Worldwide
• Out of the Box, vitamins
• ReadyForZero, ReadyForZero
• Teaching Channel, Method, Inc.

Expressing
Encouraging self expression and/or creativity.

• LoopLoop, Stimulant/Sifteo
• Pas a Pas, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
• The Film Room, R/GA

Connecting
Facilitating communication between people and communities.

• FoodHub: a digital community where local food people connect, ISITE Design
• Pepsi Refresh Project, HUGE
• Plug-In-Play, Rockwell Group
• Steps, Art Center College of Design
• Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), Microsoft

Disrupting
Re-imagining completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets.

• Ford SmartGauge, Smart Design
• Peel, Peel
• Spotify Box, Umea Institute of Design
• SWYP: See What You Print, Artefact
• The Waste Land, Touch Press LLP

Each of the finalists will be honored at the Awards Ceremony at Interaction 12 in February, where we will announce the Overall and Individual Category winners, and this year’s People’s Choice.

All of the shortlisted projects are eligible for the People’s Choice Award, and we’ll be showcasing all of the projects on the websites and open voting for People’s Choice very soon, so stay tuned.

Congratulations to the finalists, and good luck to all of the shortlisted projects. We’ll see you Dublin in February!

For the sixth profile in our series on the Interaction Awards Jury, we’ve interviewed IxDA President Janna DeVylder. Janna is a founder and principal at Meld Studios, an interaction and service design firm in Sydney, Australia. With extensive experience as a designer and researcher in the US and Australia, Janna has led design teams and large-scale projects for higher education, government, financial services, publishing and travel organisations. Janna also serves as the President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), where she is dedicated to advancing the discipline of interaction design by bringing together the global interaction design community online, at the annual Interaction conference, at the inaugural Interaction Awards and at local groups in over 100 cities around the world.

We asked Janna two questions, and here’s what she had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
I could never pick just one – it would have to be my iPhone (which is my alarm, book, bus schedule, camera, newspaper and connector) and my Moleskine notebook, which allows me to clear my head so I can move about the day with more focus. Ultimately, both are products that augment my ability to be present.

2.  What excites you about being a designer & why do you keep doing it?
One day while out walking, my five-year-old decided to put on his jacket. As he stopped to zip it up, he said, “They designed this really well!” When I asked him why he said that, he said, “Because they made it really easy for little kids to zip up.”  This excites me – to be in a time where we can have a more broad awareness and appreciation for the impact products, systems and services have on our lives, and in turn we can expect, and even demand, thoughtful design. I feel fortunate to be in a position where I can see my work impact and transform how people live and work, for the better.

You can follow Janna at @jdevylder and see what Meld is up to at @wearemeld.

There are only 2 days left to enter the Interaction Awards, which are open until this Saturday October 1st. The winners of the Interaction Awards will be celebrated at Interaction|12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

For the fifth profile in our series on the Interaction Awards Jury, we’ve interviewed Italian interaction designer Massimo Banzi.

Massimo is the co-founder of the Arduino project. He has worked as a consultant for clients such as: Prada, Artemide, Persol, Whirlpool, V&A Museum and Adidas. He spent 4 years at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea as Associate Professor. Massimo has taught workshops and has been a guest speaker at institutions like Medialab Madrid, ARS Electronica Linz, and Doors of Perception Amsterdam. Before joining IDII he was CTO for the Seat Ventures incubator. He spent many years working as a software architect, both in Milan and London, on projects for clients like Italia Online, Sapient, Labour Party, BT, and boo.com.

We asked Massimo two questions, and here’s what he had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
When I was 8 years old my dad gave me a Braun Lectron Electronics Kit. It was packaged like a book. On the left side there was an actual book you could pop out that explained how electronics work using hand-drawn bubbles that kids could understand, followed by very clean and simple instructions on how to assemble the modules. Then on the right there was a play area made of metal, where you could make various projects and then neatly store away the building blocks when you were done. You could just close up the book afterwards and put it on the book shelf.

I see people creating all these new tangible tool kits for making stuff, but this one kit for kids back in in the 60s is just perfect. The interface is very simple, beautifully designed by Dieter Rams. It makes it so quick to rearrange the cubes and build lots of things. I remember I made a radio, an audio amplifier, and a flip flop. It’s the the ultimate simple tool kit to experiment with technology. They still manufacture it in Germany, but it’s very expensive now. Everything i’ve done with Arduino is an attempt to make something as good as this.

In terms of digital products, I really like the Fitbit. It’s a very simple device that does one thing and one thing only, and it has just enough interface to forget I have it on. It’s like it disappears on me. It runs for days, and doesn’t require me to do anything. When I remember I can plug it in and it uploads the data to the server. It’s different from the other digital products because it’s not as needy; It just does it job and doesn’t constantly ask questions. Other products are like little kids, constantly crying for attention.

2 – What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?
This question is a bit surreal, because there are so many lessons that people teach you every day. That’s one of the reasons why it’s good to be alive; people are always providing new and useful ideas.

One of the first useful lessons that I remember is from my electrical engineering teacher in high school, who later gave me my first job. He taught me how to debug things: essentially how to explore a problem one step at a time so that I could understand the results of my actions at each stage, and if I fixed the problem or made it worse, so I could go back a step and restart.

Naturally, when the TV breaks, the first tendency is to just bang on it until it works. But to solve a problem you have to divide your actions into steps where you can understand the impact of each action, learn from it, and then move forward. I realized later that this was a system designed to help me to learn lessons over and over. It became a meta lesson on how to create opportunities for learning in my work. Take a measurable action, see what comes back, and learn from it.  Once you understand the impact and results of your actions you can replicate them. It’s what I try to teach my students.

You can follow Massimo on twitter at @mbanzi and @arduinoteam.

It’s the last week to enter the Interaction Awards, which are open until this Saturday October 1st. The winners of the Interaction Awards will be celebrated at Interaction|12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

For the third profile in our series on the Interaction Awards Jury, we’ve talked to London-based designer Matt Jones. Matt has been designing digital products and services since 1995. Creative director for the launch of BBC News Online, he co-founded and designed Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers since sold to Nokia. Between 2003-2005, he worked at Nokia on areas as diverse as tangible/ physical interfaces and the human experience of play. He is now Principal at BERG, a design and invention company in London. He originally studied Architecture, has written on interaction design, amongst other things, for 10 years at magicalnihilism.com and teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art.

We asked Matt two questions, and here’s what he had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
It’s a toss up between fibre-tip pens, computers, or shoes.  Fibre-tip pens are the most direct, enjoyable way I’ve found to get thinking into the world. Computers are the most frustrating but powerful way I’ve found to do so, and I can think of nothing better than finding a really good pair of running shoes or walking boots.

2 – When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?
Probably when I was 14 and had a job in a printers.

You can learn more about Matt and his work at BERG at http://berglondon.com/blog.

The Interaction Awards are open until September 22, and will be celebrated at Interaction|12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

For the third profile in our series on the Interaction Awards Jury, we’ve talked to London-based designer Matt Jones. Matt has been designing digital products and services since 1995. Creative director for the launch of BBC News Online, he co-founded and designed Dopplr.com, a service for frequent travellers since sold to Nokia. Between 2003-2005, he worked at Nokia on areas as diverse as tangible/ physical interfaces and the human experience of play. He is now Principal at BERG, a design and invention company in London. He originally studied Architecture, has written on interaction design, amongst other things, for 10 years at magicalnihilism.com and teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art.

We asked Matt two questions, and here’s what he had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
It’s a toss up between fibre-tip pens, computers, or shoes.  Fibre-tip pens are the most direct, enjoyable way I’ve found to get thinking into the world. Computers are the most frustrating but powerful way I’ve found to do so, and I can think of nothing better than finding a really good pair of running shoes or walking boots.

2 – When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?
Probably when I was 14 and had a job in a printers.

You can learn more about Matt and his work at BERG at http://berglondon.com/blog.

The Interaction Awards are open until September 22, and will be celebrated at Interaction|12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) today announces that Google will be the founding sponsor of the inaugural Interaction Awards and the Diamond Sponsor of the Interaction 12 Conference in Dublin, Ireland in February 2012.

 This partnership with IxDA demonstrates Google’s commitment to excellence in interaction design and their support of the global interaction design community. Their support further underscores the importance of the interaction design discipline inside of Google and demand for interaction design talent throughout the world.

“Interaction design is at the heart of Google’s mission to make sure our users have the very best experiences we can provide,” said Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google. “Supporting these initiatives is important to Google, and we’re thrilled to be among the first companies celebrating and supporting IxDA’s international efforts.”

Through the conference, IxDA provides an opportunity for interaction design professionals to come together to learn and share the practice and theory of interaction design from around the world. Through the inaugural Interaction Awards, that theory and practice is evaluated and celebrated, honoring the very best examples of interaction design.

“IxDA is grateful for the enormous support Google is providing in strengthening these very important initiatives,” said Janna DeVylder, President of IxDA. “Google’s commitment to IxDA’s Interaction Awards and the Interaction 12 Conference illuminates the importance of interaction design in creating products and services that fit and enhance the lives of people everywhere.”

To celebrate, the Interaction Awards is extending the submission deadline until 1 October, giving participants one more week to finalize their entries. Interaction 12 conference early-bird registration closes October 31. The Interaction Awards will be presented during the Interaction 12 conference in Dublin. Those interested in submitting work for the awards or attending the February conference can find more information at http://www.ixda.org.

For the second profile in our series on the Interaction Awards Jury, we’ve talked to Design Researcher Younghee Jung. Younghee is leading the NokiaResearch Center in Bangalore, India. Her research centers on the social potential of mobile technology and behavioral change. Over the last decade, she has managed and created interdisciplinary teams of insight, design and innovation in Helsinki, Tokyo and London. She earned a B.S. in Industrial Design at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and M.A. in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University as Fulbright Scholar. Her current work focuses on basic enablers of mobile technology use for growth markets, suitable for the local culture and its potentials.

We asked Younghee two questions, and here’s what she had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
My favorite product of all times is the toilet. While everyone spends an inevitable portion of their lifetime using it, its importance is surprisingly downplayed. If you have ever been interested in the human history of sanitation, or living conditions in developing countries, you would surely appreciate how our quality of life is dramatically improved by toilets that can co-exist in our living room and made our biological necessity fulfilled without making us feel that we are a part of the nature. I particularly like Japanese toilet seats, or ‘washlets’ as they exemplify companies thinking about how we can improve our toilet experience in various aspects: Heated seats prevent elderly people getting heart attacks in the cold winter; washing functions are optimized for whatever your needs are; sensors allow lids to open and close and flushing to take place automatically, eliminating the need to touch anything in the toilet; some may even start play music or flushing sound to take care of your psychological comfort in private or public. It is an experience that is easy to dismiss as over-design, but something you get to appreciate deeply for their obvious benefits through use. Washlet also makes me think that design needs to be culturally and environmentally relevant, as it may be only a safety hazard in environments where electricity cuts are very frequent or humidity control in the house is impossible. By contrast, Indian trains demonstrate a beautifully simple squatting toilet design that minimizes the need for cleaning or gimmicks for flushing.

2 – What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?
OLPC (One laptop per child) is a well-designed and intended product. It highlighted the need for reducing the digital divide throughout the world. Connected digital tools provide a huge potential of reducing the dependency on the institutional learning, which a lot of children do not have opportunities for. However in order to utilize the benefit of the digital, literacy needs to be achieved first – local language as well as English. It is not about redesigning of OLPC, but finding a way to equip people with the basic skills needed to become a citizen of the digital universe with broader reach.

You can learn more about Younghee at http://younghee.com and follow her on twitter @jabberer.

The Interaction Awards are open until 22 September, and will be celebrated at Interaction 12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

The Interaction Awards is honored to have the support and participation of an international panel of expert jurors, and we’d like to introduce them to you. For the first in our series of jury profiles, we spoke with Interaction 12 Keynote speaker Jonas Löwgren.

Jonas Löwgren is professor of interaction design and co-founder at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden. He specializes in cross-media products, interactive visualization and the design theory of digital materials. Jonas has taught interaction design in university courses and in companies since the early 1990’s and initiated the influential two-year master’s program in interaction design at Malmö University in 1998. He has published some 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers and three books, including Thoughtful Interaction Design. His design portfolio comprises some 50 projects from explorative research and professional contexts.

We asked Jonas two questions and here’s what he had to say:

1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
My 2B 0.7 pencil, because it never stops challenging me. I use it for hours every day, and I have used pencils for many, many years, still there is always another question waiting: How can I draw this? What should I write next? What do these marks tell me, right here right now, concerning the idea I am trying to capture and shape?

Sketchbook Pro on a HP Slate comes surprisingly close. It has clear benefits over pencil in terms of production, such as layers and transformation tools, but alas it does not quite draw me into conversations with myself the way the pencil does.

2 – What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?
The most important lesson I have learned is that there is always more to learn. All manners of humility, curiosity and explorative mindsets start there, which is sort of useful for a designer.

I can’t trace that lesson to a particular person, but I suspect it happened to me a couple of years into PhD studies. You know, at the point when your arrogant sense of knowing almost everything there is to know on your dissertation subject is shattered by increased acquiantance with the research literatures in your own field and related fields.

The most memorable lesson I have learned is easier. It was taught to me by my oldest daughter, and she did it simply by being born on New Year’s night fifteen years ago. At that moment, I could literally feel my fundamental values shift inside me. Before, it was sort of 50/50 on what would mean the most to me in life: my family or my own ambitions, such as a professional career. The minute after, it was obvious what was truly important: I knew that I would be living with my heart outside my body for the rest of my life, as someone has put it.

Read more about Jonas on his website.

The Interaction Awards are open until 22 September, and will be celebrated at Interaction|12 in Dublin in February 2012. Find out more, read about our other jurors, and submit your work!

‍

Since the launch of the Interaction Awards last week, a few people have asked us why there are fees for entry, and where all of that money goes. The answer is simple: the entry fees are in place to fund the Awards program itself, and to create a new platform within IxDA for recognizing tangible examples of design excellence.

The scope of the Interaction Awards is ambitious. The impact of our growing field is wide and diverse, and it is our mission to reach beyond our community to demonstrate the value of interaction design within the global economy. Creating this conversation on an international scale requires commitment, logistics, infrastructure, and, well, travel. It’s these things, and hopefully a lot more, that your entry fees will support.

A key component to the success of this program is our esteemed international jury. To reflect the varied range of cultures, domains and expertise within the field of interaction design, we chose jurors of various experience from across the globe. From Younghee Jung, based in Bangalore to Jonas Lowgren in Malmo and Massimo Banzi in Milan. From Matt Jones in London to IxDA President Janna DeVylder in Sydney, and Helen Walters and our Jury Chair Robert Fabricant in NYC. These seven experts have committed their time, energy, and unique perspectives on our field to evaluate our work and elevate the design discussion with the world at large.

To bring their international perspectives together into a single conversation, evaluation by the jury will be conducted in person. We believe that presence and discourse are essential to the process. So our jury will meet all together in one room for two days in October, to review and discuss the shortlisted work: they’ll review videos, reflect on essays; touch, hold, and try out prototypes. The entry fees will cover their flights and lodging, and a small honorarium for their time.

An addition, an award program like this requires robust technological infrastructure to support the online entry process. We needed a system that could support complex work flows around user accounts, entry submission, international payments, and community voting. Due to the work required of our volunteer staff, and a need to be able to quickly troubleshoot any unforeseen issues that arise in this first year, we licenced a third-party awards management platform called mBlast. While the interaction and interface constraints of using mBlast are not pretty, it provides the infrastructure we needed to get this program off the ground. A portion of the entry fees pay for that.

And lastly, at the end of this first year, we’ll have a lot to celebrate. The Interaction Awards will honor the inaugural winners at an awards ceremony and party hosted at Interaction|12, in Dublin, Ireland. Some of the proceeds from the entries will fund the logistics behind producing this international event, subsidizing winners’ travel, and furnishing prizes to be awarded.

How did we determine the fees? While there is a fee for entry into the Awards, all fees are not created equally. To reflect the diversity of the global IxDA community and support fair and inclusive participation, the entry fees are tiered according to geography and professional status. The fee structure was guided by research across comparative programs, and the widely accepted International Monetary Fund classification.

But there’s more, we hope. We’re currently looking for an industry sponsor to underwrite the operational costs of the program so that some of the money we raise can go back into the IxDA community. With a sponsor in place, we can build the necessary infrastructure for the awards program going forward, establish international scholarships, and fund community programs that raise awareness of the global voices within our field. With each entry we get closer to this goal.

‍
Please enter at http://awards.ixda.org!

Tweet about the Interaction Awards and follow us on Twitter for updates.Show your support on Facebook Like the Interaction Awards.

‍

We’re very excited to open the inaugural Interaction Awards for entry, as announced in Fast Company this morning. We created the awards to celebrate excellence in our field, and to encourage the global interaction design community to share our work. The 2012 Awards will start a dialogue, inspire designers and businesses alike, raise the profile of interaction design, and demonstrate its value in the global economy. Any projects completed within the past two years are eligible, so please submit your past projects and tell all of your friends. Reflecting the diversity of the global IxDA community, entry fees are tiered according to your geography and professional status. Prizes will be awarded to professionals and students alike, for production and concept work within six interaction categories.

Interaction categories? We thought long and hard about how to best categorize our work. Platforms, industries and domains say very little about what we actually do. For a while we considered having no categories at all, but we opted for categories that would challenge us to think about the intentions of our work and the nature of the interactions we create: Optimizing, engaging, empowering, expressing, connecting, disrupting, and these sit across platforms, domains, and cultures. We haven’t made the jury’s job easy, but they’re up to the task.

We’re honored to have Robert Fabricant, Vice President, Creative at Frog Design, join us as the inaugural Jury Chair of the Interaction Awards. Robert is joined by a panel of carefully-selected jurors, chosen for their international experience and expertise in interaction design. The six jury members for 2012 are: Massimo Banzi (Milan, Italy), Janna DeVylder (Sydney, Australia), Matt Jones (London, UK), Younghee Jung (Bangalore, India), Jonas Löwgren (Malmo, Sweden), and Helen Walters (New York, USA). You can read more about them here. The jury will meet during National Design Week in October 2011 to evaluate entries and recognize up to 35 outstanding works across the 6 categories, based on the criteria of context, impact and craft.

Winners will be notified November 2011, and officially announced and celebrated at the Interaction 12 conference in Dublin, Ireland February 2012. There will be prizes, and we promise they’ll be good.

While today marks the start of an ambitious program, it’s been nearly a year in the making. Our team has been building the infrastructure to bring you these awards, from setting goals to establishing partnerships, to designing the entry process and creating the categories. We’ve learned a lot along the way, have taken constraints in stride, and made the best of what we’ve had to work with. Our technical constraints have proven particularly tricky, and the 3rd party awards entry platform we’ve got, which you’ll see, definitely needs our help. Believe me, the irony is not lost on us.

This is a work in progress though; built by volunteers, and now shared with you, so that it can grow with the strength of our community: our participation, our discussion, and the examples we set for interaction designers to come. We’ll get through the bumps and come out the other side with a lot to celebrate. We’re looking forward Dublin!

We’re just getting started, please help us spread the word:

Tweet about the Interaction Awards and follow us on Twitter for updates.

Show your support on Facebook Like the Interaction Awards.