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Please join us in welcoming Christina Xu, the chair of the 2018 Interaction Awards Jury. Her unique ability to unpack social interactions around technology, identify cultural trends, and her ethnographic approach, will offer insightful leadership for this years committee.

Christina currently runs a research agency, Vernacular Systems. She has conducted exploratory research projects in China and the US for clients including GE, Daimler Chrysler, Spotify, and Quip. Her public work on China is collected as Multi Entry, a multimedia exploration of life in contemporary China.

As faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Interaction Design program, she teaches a class called Entrepreneurial Design with Gary Chou. She is also an advisor to Data & Society, Orbital, and the Fine Chocolate and Cacao Institute.

Christina’s understanding of communities is informed by her experiences of helping to grow some unusual ones, including: Letters for Black Lives, a set of collaboratively written and translated resources for facilitating conversations around social justice; the Awesome Foundation, a decentralized, global network of guerrilla philanthropists; and ROFLCon, a conference/convention about internet culture that ran from 2008–2012. Her work has been profiled in BBC Worldwide, the Washington Post, NYT Magazine, the Atlantic, and Paper Magazine. She holds an A.B. in History of Science from Harvard College.

After last year’s thrilling showcase of diverse and ingenious work, we’re excited to open up awards submissions for the 2018 Interaction Awards.

Founded by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Interaction Awards honor design quality and innovation, open conversations within the community, and continuously advance the practice of Interaction Design as it continues to become a driving force for change.

We accept submissions in the following six categories: Optimizing, Engaging, Empowering, Expressing, Connecting, and Disrupting. All entries will be evaluated based on the following criteria: opportunity, audience, craft, and overall impact. All entries are judged in two rounds. The first round is an anonymous peer-review, which is open to all IxDA members who wish to participate. Shortlisted entries will then enter a second round, which will be closely evaluated by our 2018 Interaction Awards jury.

We believe in diversity and actively encourage participation from all over the world, across all levels of experience. This is why we accept not just professional but student projects as well. Fees are structured by professional or student status and geographic region. Read more about the Interaction Awards categories, rules, and prizes.

New Co-Chair

We are happy to announce that we have a new awards co-chair, Rodrigo Vera, who will be steering the team together with Molly Wright Steenson.

They are both looking forward to seeing your work and greeting you at the next Interaction Awards celebration on Wednesday evening, 8 February 2018, during the Interaction Week in Lyon, France.

New Awards Jury

Our new jury chair is still a secret — but will be revealed soon. We will also be introducing a new jury for this year and will be sharing profiles in the coming months. We’ll keep you posted!

Spread the word

We have exciting plans in store and we can’t wait to share them with you as the year unfolds. In the meantime, please help us spread the word:

• Tweet about the Interaction Awards (#IxDAwards) and follow us on Twitter (@ixdawards) for updates
• Show your support on Facebook and like the Interaction Awards

Submit your best design work

Help us to further elevate the practice of Interaction Design this year by entering your favorite project work — and encouraging others to enter theirs.

And, please, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have questions or suggestions: awards@ixda.org

After the beautiful experience from New York, Interaction Week moves from the North American continent to Europe and most exactly to Lyon France. We are very happy to return to Europe to live the most important week about interaction design and user experience in the entire world.

Interaction Week 18 wants to reflect on how technology and design are shaping the world moving forward by building bridges across cultures, disciplines and industries to reach shared goals.

We are going to listen to experts and join conversations to reshape our changing relations with ourselves, our objects, the environment and the society as a whole.

The Week in short:

‍Education Summit / Workshops / 3 days conference / Student Design Challenge / The interaction Awards / Field trips & surprises

See you soon Lyon! City at Confluence!

At Capital One, we invest in design. We’ve spent the last few years building an organization of super-talented designers across the country, including the acquisition of Adaptive Path in 2014. Most of that design muscle has been flexed to improve consumers’ experiences — helping people achieve their dreams through our banking, credit card, and home and auto-loan services. Now that’s being augmented with the creation of a world-class Commercial Banking Design team. Based in NYC, this team will grow to 45 people by the end of 2017, and works exclusively with the commercial product and technology teams to create beautiful experiences for businesses and the people who work in them — because businesses and employees have dreams too.

Recognizing excellence — being able to understand what makes a good experience good, and why — is crucial for any organization seeking to build a competency in design. In support of this we are delighted to announce our sponsorship of the IxDA Interaction Awards.

The IxDA Interaction Awards have been recognizing excellence for the past five years. They celebrate and select the best design work across its network of 70,000 members and 170 local chapters around the globe. Every year, they capture of the state of interaction design; marking its progress and inspiring the generation of designers to build upon those ideas to further our practice. It sets the benchmark of great design work and pushes us to ask, “What can we learn from this project and how can we apply their success in our own work?”

“Developing a language of critique and being able to recognize excellence is so important to us,” said Richard Dalton, Capital One’s Head of Design for Commercial Banking. “We’re delighted to support and learn from the interaction design community by sponsoring the Awards.”

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Vote for the 2017 People’s Choice Award!‍

We’re looking forward to celebrating the 2017 Interaction Awards winners on 8 February at Interaction17 in New York, but there is one more award left to choose: The People’s Choice Award.

Cast your vote!‍

It’s your turn to be the judge. This is the one award where the design community chooses to elevate and celebrate one project that represents the best of Interaction Design among this year’s shortlisted entries. The Interaction Awards’ People’s Choice voting is now officially open at http://awards.ixda.org/entries.

How it works‍

It’s simple and will only take you few minutes:
1.  Review the shortlisted projects.
2. Find the project you think represents best-in-class interaction design.
3. Vote. On each project page, you’ll find a “Vote” button that will enable you to Tweet your vote.

Voting Rules‍

You may vote once for each project you wish to support. Retweets are nice but only original tweets will be counted, and only one vote per project for each Twitter account is allowed.

The Deadline‍

The project with the most votes as of midnight (New York time) on February 7th will win! The recipient of the People’s Choice Award will be announced along with other winners at the Interaction Awards ceremony. Including a years worth of bragging rights.

Spread the word and vote your favorite projects!

Santiago, Chile, November 2016. eleven humans, an earthquake and several dishes of wild eel. The basic ingredients for a weekend full of discussion, of debate—and not always in consensus, and final deliberation. By the end of the weekend, this talented group selected the Finalists for the 2017 Interaction Awards!

The entries this year were diverse and covered a much broader range of topics. The 2017 shortlist stood out to us as the projects mostly characterized as heavyweight problem-solving. From crime-fighting to workers rights, immigration issues, or even to help people with disabilities create music—there were a lot of fantastic design approaches to important topics.

With that in mind we invited our six jury members to the Santiago office of Continuum, who graciously hosted us and provided a space to deliberate and a constant supply of coffee. We started reviewing the shortlisted entries in pairs, two jurors covering two awards categories. Big thanks to Christian Svanes Kolding, our director of the short films, who captured the jury’s deliberation, process, and conclusions in selecting the finalist and winners in each category.

On Sunday, the focus shifted to selecting our special awards recipients: Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, the People’s Choice and the Future Voice Award.

We’re excited to reveal all the winners at next year’s conference in New York, where we will celebrate and honor some of the best design work around the globe.

Without further ado, we’re incredibly proud to present this year’s Finalists. The final question will be, who will win in each category? You’ll have to see for yourself in New York City on February 8th.

Connecting‍

Facilitating communication between people and communities

IOM – reimaging medication labelling
Frontend.com, Professional, Ireland
Microsoft Inclusive Toolkit
Microsoft, Professional, United States
Heart Partner
Novartis and FCB Health, Professional, United States
COBALT: Fighting Crime with Design
Mark43, Professional, United States

Disrupting‍

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

LinkNYC
Intersection, Professional, United States
Re-imagining Atomic Force Microscopy
Infragistics, Professional, United States
SAVE THE FOOD
SapientNitro, Professional, United States
Kinetic
One Million Metrics Corp & RGA, Professional, United States

Empowering‍

Enabling people to go beyond their limits

Nume – Personalised Nutrition
Umeå Institute of Design, Student, Sweden
Eye Conductor
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Student, Denmark
COBALT: Fighting Crime with Design
Mark43, Professional, United States
Microsoft Inclusive Toolkit
Microsoft, Professional, United States

Engaging‍

Capturing attention, creating delight and delivering meaning

Peer
Moment – Student project for internship, Student, United States
Mia Journeys App
SapientNitro, Professional, United States
BioDesign
Local Projects, Professional, United States

Expressing‍

Encouraging self expression and/or creativity

Together Radio – An Anonymous Support Group Network
Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University / National Institute of Design, India, Student
Vochlea: Prototyping Music
Royal College of Art, Student, United Kingdom
Musiclock
Taiste, Professional, Finland
Eye Conductor
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Student, Denmark

Optimizing‍

Making daily activities more efficient

IOM – reimaging medication labelling
Frontend.com, Professional, Ireland
Collective Health Member Experience
Collective Health, Professional, United States
Immigration New Zealand Visa Gateway
DNA Designed Communications Ltd, Professional, New Zealand
Kinetic
One Million Metrics Corp & R/GA, Professional, United States

Up next

‍People’s Choice voting will open early January 2017: All shortlisted projects are eligible. Stay tuned for details!

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The 2017 Interaction Awards Shortlist is here!We’re thrilled to announce the 74 projects representing 13 countries that have been named for inclusion in the 2017 Interaction Awards Shortlist.We are especially proud to announce that 30% of the shortlisted projects come from students enrolled in design programs around the globe. Congratulations!

View the shortlisted projects in detail by category.

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted their work and shared their work with us. We are truly impressed by the body of work and the overall professional and social relevance of the submitted projects. It really feels that Interaction Design in 2017 is ready to make a difference.

During the next weekend of November 5th and 6th the 2017 Jury will review this shortlist at Continuum in Santiago and choose the 2017 finalists and winners. We will publish the list of finalists at December 1st. To find out who the lucky winners are, well for that you’ll have to join us for the 2017 Awards Ceremony at Gotham Hall in New York City, February 8th 2017.

All shortlisted projects are as well eligible for the People’s Choice Award, online voting for which will open on January 9th. The winner of the People’s choice awards will be recognized on stage during the Interaction 17 conference and of course published here on our website.

Last but not least we would like to say thank you to everyone involved in the peer reviewing process. The Interaction Awards can never be possible without the help of the dedicated IxDA community.

Molly Wright Steenson & Thomas Kueber
Interaction Awards Chairs 2017

Our jury is complete and we are excited to introduce Michelle and Daljit.

Michelle Berryman‍

Michelle is the Managing Director of Strategy & Innovation at LiquidHub. Her practice centers on guiding the vision and innovation efforts for digital customer experience with websites, social channels, e-commerce initiatives, software, portals and applications. Throughout her award-winning career, she has worked with brands like Coca-Cola, SAP, Kroger, Electrolux, Nike, Express and Hewlett-Packard, to build meaningful customer experiences across channels within the digital ecosystem and in the physical world.

Michelle is a Fellow in the Industrial Designers Society of America, has served as IDSA President and was recently named one of the 50 Most Influential Designers of the last 50 years by the membership. She serves on the boards for Good Design Australia and for the IxDA (Interaction Design Association). She has spoken and led workshops at conferences around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Poland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States.

Daljit Singh‍

Daljit Singh is a creative digital strategist with a global flair who deploys design methodology to solve big business issues. As the Principal Director, Design Strategy for Fjord in EALA (Europe, Africa, Latin America), Daljit collaborates with our European studios and design directors, and is an integral part of the leadership team across EALA.

Having founded his own agencies and collaborated with design visionaries like Sir Terence Conran, he has 20 years’ experience in the digital interactive communications industry and is a fixture on the Financial Times’ annual Top 50 Creative Minds listing.

Daljit founded Happiness, the creative business consultancy, in 2012. From 2010-2012, he was founding partner of Conran Singh, the then digital arm of Sir Terence Conran’s empire. He joined Conran Group from Digit, the pioneering digital agency he founded in 1996 and sold to WPP in 2005.

Daljit’s work has been recognized with a D&AD Black Pencil Award, Design Week Best of Show and two BAFTA’s. His work and thinking has been on display at exhibitions at The ICA and Centre Pompidou. He was a former curator of The Future of Luxury at London’s V&A Museum.

After the peer reviewing phase they will join us in Santiago, Chile during Interaction South America 2016 and find this year’s finalists and winners. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated!

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Submissions for the 2017 Interaction Awards are closed! We are delighted to announce that this is the most diverse year in Interaction Awards history, with almost a third of the entries coming from outside of the United States.

With submissions closed, we will start the peer review process. We’ve asked a number of members from the IxDA community to be a part of the review, with each project reviewed at least three times. From there, we will decide on the shortlist that will be judged at the Jury Weekend in Santiago, Chile on 5–6 November.

We’ll announce the shortlist on 1 November. Stay tuned, and we look forward to seeing your excellent submissions!

As we are approaching the end of this year’s submission period we would like to take a minute and introduce you to the first members of our jury: Eddie Opara, Juliana Rotich, Giorgia Lupi and Nelly Ben Hayoun.

Eddie Opara

Eddie Opara studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1997. He began his career as a designer at ATG and Imaginary Forces and worked as an art director at 2×4 before establishing his own studio, The Map Office, in 2005. He joined Pentagram’s New York office as partner in 2010.

A multifaceted designer, Opara’s work encompasses strategy, design and technology. His projects have included the design of interactive installations, websites, user interfaces and software, brand identity, publications, packaging, and environments, with many of his projects ranging across multiple media.

His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has appeared in publications such as Archis, Surface, Graphis and I.D.

Juliana Rotich

Juliana Rotich is a technologist, strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker. She is Executive Director of BRCK.org, a not for profit affiliate of BRCK Inc. for deploying reliable technology for the edges of society, and advocating for internet access and literacy. She drives partnerships for tackling social problems through connectivity and appropriate technology.  She is a Venture Partner in Africa Technology Ventures (ATV) which is raising a fund to invest in and support the growth of tech enabled startups in key sectors in East and West Africa.

Before that she co-founded Ushahidi Inc., a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software and worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry for over 10 years.

Today, Juliana also serves as an advisor to the councils of BASF, Risk Cooperative, and the Lemelson Foundation.

Giorgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi is an information designer. Her work in information visualization frequently crosses the divide between digital and print, exploring visual models and metaphors to represent dense and rich data-driven stories.

After graduating in Architecture at Ferrara University in 2006 she has been involved in multidisciplinary projects on the information, technology and interaction design fields, using design and data visualization to convey complex systems of information.

She is co-founder and design director at Accurat (accurat.it), an information design agency based in Milan and New York; Accurat analyzes data and contexts and designs analytical tools and visual narratives that provide awareness, comprehension and engagement. Accurat was born in 2011 and since then has been working successfully with important Italian and international clients such as the European Union, the United Nations, Audubon Society, Popular Science, and ING Direct.

Nelly Ben Hayoun

Dubbed the ‘Willy Wonka of Design and Science’, Nelly is an award ​winning explorer and director, a fearless and passionate provocateur. She is the Designer of Experiences at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Head of Experiences at We Transfer, a Wired Innovation fellow, Advisor to the United Nations Virtual Reality Lab, a member of the International astronautical federation and in 2013 Icon Magazine touted Ben Hayoun as one of the 50 international designers “shaping the future”. She works with leading scientists to devise subversive events and bring chaos and critical thinking amongst members of the public and institutions.

Led by the 2017 jury chair Ravi Naidoo, the Interaction Awards Jury will gather in early November in Santiago, Chile to select this years finalists in each category. Stay tuned for more updates on the jury!

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2017 Interaction Awards deadline extended to 19 September, 11:59 pm PDT.

We're extending our deadline by two weeks. With the jury weekend coming up at the beginning of November, it's not much but it's a little more time for you to submit your projects to the InteractionWe’re very happy to announce the extended deadline for:

• San Francisco - September 19,  11:59 pm
• New York - September 20,  at 2:59 am
• London - September 20 at 7:59 am
• Berlin - September 20 at 8:59 am
• Johannesburg - September 20 at 8:59 am
• Moscow - September 20 at 9:59 am
• Mumbai - September 20 at 12:29 pm
• Hong Kong - September 20, 2015 at 2:59 pm
• Tokyo - September 20, 2015 at 3:59 pm
• Sydney - September 20, 2015 at 4:59 pm

But hey, you don't need to be the last one to the party. Our submission link works 24 hours a day until then:http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

‍If you still feel there is something to clarify? Check out our Help section for FAQs or ask us something new at awards@ixda.org

Our friends from Wayfindr, last year’s Best in the Category Empowering and Best in Show, talk a little on how they approached their submission – that finally brought them on stage in Helsinki.

“With two team members with a background in Interaction Design, including our CEO Umesh Pandya, entering the Interaction Awards in 2015 just felt like the right thing to do. The submission required a video component, which allowed us the freedom to present our project in the way we wanted, with our own voices. We already had a video, which we made to communicate the concept of Wayfindr, and we used this as a starting point. We took this footage and refined the talking heads, to help tighten up the messaging, and then – with the help of a video editor — we came up with our submission video.

When we won the  Interaction Award 2016 for Best in Empowering and Best in Show it was a truly remarkable moment for all of us on the Wayfindr team. We have been working on the Wayfindr Open Standard for two years now and while we believe that what we are doing is important it was gratifying to see that other people believed in us as well.

Wayfindr’s mission is to empower people to navigate the world independently, so winning the Empowering award felt like a real acknowledgement of that mission. We have always been a driven team but this gave us an extra push to keep working hard to ensure that the Open Standard is adopted globally.

The Interaction Awards are important for drawing attention to all manner of innovations that are going on in the tech space. We met so many people who are doing amazing things to try and improve the world through technology and seeing their devotion to it felt like a reflection of our own.”

Our last category for this year’s Interaction Awards we would like to introduce you to is EXPRESSING.

Also this time we were honored to capture the personal opinion about this category of our previous jury members Itamar Medeiros, Senior User Experience Design Specialist at SAP, and Brenda Laurel, principal of Neogaian Interactive. For the future they wish to see projects that support the user in self-expression. Tools that make people to become more civil and respectful with each other.

You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 "Expressing" category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

If you are ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

until 5 September 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

For our fifth category of this year’s Awards, we are looking at CONNECTING.

“How do the projects allow people to connect?” — this is the main question we ask for submitted projects in this category.

People are connected with networks, but also to data, and stories through an interface. How does the connection impact the people now and in the future? According to our last year’s jury members, Itamar Medeiros, Senior User Experience Design Specialist at SAP,  and Amber Case, Author of Calm Technology, the overall goal of this category is to connect people better to solve their problems.

You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 “Connecting” category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

If you are ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/submission

until 5 September 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

Our next category dives into the question how interaction design can engage its users in new and exciting ways. Amber Case, Author of Calm Technology, calls for a technology that makes more use of senses for next year’s entries in engaging category. Interaction design should capture everyday’s attention, next to creating delight and delivering meaning.

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You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 „Engaging“ category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

If you are ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

until 5 September 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

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The 2016 Jury members Alok Nandi, Principal at Architempo, and Leisa Reichelt, Head of Service Design and User Research of the Digital Transformation Office of Australia, explain in this video what they would like to see in future projects.

You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 „Empowering“ category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

If you are ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

until September 5th, 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

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Today we would like to introduce you to our second category of the Interaction Awards called “Optimizing”. Which specific challenges can be solved by optimized interactions in a country like India? And from a broader perspective – how can efficient daily activities change the life of everyone?

Thanks to our 2016 Jury members Leisa Reichelt, Head of Service Design and User Research of Digital Transformation Office, and Sudhir Sharma, Founder of INDI Design and Chief Editor/Publisher of the POOL Magazine, who shared their opinion on how they understand the category.

You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 „Optimizing“ category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

If you are ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

until 5 September 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

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We are starting with ”Disrupting,” the re-imagining of completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets.

Watch Brenda Laurel, Principal at Neogaian Interactive and Sudhir Sharma, Founder of INDI Design and Chief Editor/Publisher of the POOL Magazine in this short video explaining what this mean for entering in this category.

You can also take a look at the finalists and winners in the 2016 ”Disrupting” category.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at:
awards@ixda.org

Ready to submit your work, go to:
http://awards.ixda.org/enter/

Deadline September 5th, 2016 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (USA).

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Please join us in welcoming Ravi Naidoo, the chair of the 2017 Interaction Awards Jury. From his base in Cape Town, South Africa, Ravi offers over two decades of design and social innovation leadership.

Ravi has a passion for bringing together the design community. He founded Interactive Africa, an initiative intended to not only establish the creative industry in South Africa and bring South Africa to the world stage. He’s led the First Man of Africa in Space campaign, garnered the 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa, and headed the African Connection Rally to promote telecommunications investment in South Africa. He is perhaps best known for starting the Indaba Conference, founded in 2004, which is an international conference that connects thought-leaders, entrepreneurs, and designers to Cape Town to envision a better world through creativity. His efforts have fostered economic growth in his country and have helped Cape Town to be named World Design Capital in 2014.

Ravi has been internationally recognized for his design leadership and ingenuity. We are thrilled to have his vision and leadership for the 2017 Interaction Awards in New York.

Founded by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Interaction Awards honour design quality and innovation, open conversations amongst the community and continuously advance the practice of Interaction Design. We accept entries in the following six categories: 
Optimizing, Engaging, Empowering, Expressing, Connecting, and Disrupting.All entries will be evaluated based on the following criteria: opportunity, audience, impact, craft and category appropriateness. All entries are judged in two rounds. The first is an anonymous peer-review by IxDA members and second, for shortlisted entries, by our 2017 Interaction Awards jury.As in previous years, we actively encourage participation from all over the world and across all levels of experience. Entry fees have not changed and continue to be structured by professional or student status and geographic region.

What is new

A few updates from last years awards. We are happy to announce that we have a new awards co-chair, Molly W. Steenson, who will be steering the team together with Thomas Kueber.They are both looking forward to seeing your work and greeting you at the next Interaction Awards celebration on Wednesday evening, 8 February, 2017, during the Interaction Week in New York City.We will also be introducing a new jury for this year. Who we have got for this year’s jury chair is still a secret - but will be revealed soon!We have exciting plans in store for this year’s Awards, and we can’t wait to share them with you. In the meantime, please help us spread the word:

• Tweet about the Interaction Awards (#IxDAwards) and follow us on Twitter for updates
• Show your support on Facebook. Like the Interaction Awards

Help us to further elevate the practice of Interaction Design this year by entering your favorite project work — and encouraging others to enter theirs. And, please, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have questions or suggestions: awards@ixda.org