Climate Designers

For me, this selection was about the future, right? It's about where I hope interaction design will go. And the promise here is always, for me, about interdisciplinarity, about telling a story, about our capacity to imagine what the world might be, not what the world is. And this selection, for me, reflects all of those things. So for me, this was recipient exemplifies some of the things that I think are really important about where we're moving as a community.

Out of the Box is a simple yet effective solution for the increasing number of cell-phone users who have difficulties with learning to use a new smartphone. For older people, this experience can be particularly frustrating as they apply analogue modes of learning to digital experiences - looking in the box for help that simply is not there. Rather than design a dumbed down “special phone”, the designers decided to look at the problem in a different way. Instead of designing another device, they looked at changing the way people learn to use them. By drawing on user strengths and familiar mental models, the designers created a set of books which would act as the packaging and provide an entire learning experience for any device. The books actually contain the phone, and use each page turn to reveal the elements of the phone in the right order, helping the user to set up the sim card, battery and even slide the case onto the phone. The phone then slots into the book, which acts as the main manual. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.

India boasts 1.8 million K-12 schools and a student base of 321 million! Since the implementation of Covid-19 restrictions, students have been asked to stay home and advised to online or distance learning indefinitely. As a result, prolonged isolation, decrease in outdoor play times, and increased screen time is expected to impact students’ emotional well-being. Formal education in the new normal also presents novel challenges for teachers as it is hard to discern emotions and emotive feedback virtually.

Mimica believes in better freshness through intelligence that can help reduce waste throughout a product’s lifecycle. In countries like the UK, 60% of wasted food is still perfectly safe to consume. By creating accessible, affordable freshness indicators for all types of perishable products, from food to pharmaceuticals, Mimica aims to become the globally recognized mark of freshness.

‘Enhans’ is a system designed to improve doctor-patient communication within the NeuroImaging and Interventional Radiology (NIIR) Department at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, India. Being an institute of eminence, NIMHANS receives a large amount of patients from all over the country. Due to their different socio-economic backgrounds and the fact that they speak several different regional languages, it is often difficult for patients to communicate efficiently with the doctors. On a daily basis, both doctors and patients are faced with several challenges that lead to miscommunication and inhibit the patient from being able to take informed decisions about their treatment.

Bridge is a platform that exposes people to a wide range of political perspectives and enables one-on-one discussion between users. This project began when I started taking a closer look at my social media feed and became all too familiar with the toxic dialogue that often surrounded politics. It felt like we hid behind our screens and used our online presence to talk to each other in ways we never would in person. In addition, I became more and more aware of the recommendation algorithms that curated my social media feed and pushed me to only encounter political content I already agreed with. It was clear that social media was pushing people into their own echo chambers and becoming a vector for extremely polarized and toxic political discourse.

Every summer, a team of scientists from Queen Mary University travels to Cape Verde where they deploy sensors and trackers on nesting loggerhead turtles, to track them and understand their complex and mysterious behavioral patterns as they return to the ocean. The scientists came to Wolf In Motion to help make the complex data gained from the turtles more usable and understandable.

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. They are envisaged to be part of the vastly ignored recreational product ecosystem for people living with Dementia (PLWD) managed by their caregivers or as a part of the toolbox music therapy professionals employ.

Long before I decided to study multimedia design, I had a strong interest in the intricate nature of fractal structures. Years later, I decided to give it another try with all the knowledge about design and especially user interfaces and interaction I had earned. A major challenge was to find a balance between enabling graphical complexity versus reducing interface complexity. The mathematics and algorithms behind Iterazer have lots of dependencies and meaningful settings, but I strived to focus on the central aspect of what appaled to me the most - the graphical patterns emerging from interaction. Iterazer enables people to harness graphical complexity in a novel, very intuitive and compelling way. Another challenge was to find a way to handle the generated images in a way that felt natural and differ from the files, folders and lists used by today’s applications.

Tax is a give-and-take system that binds our society together as humans by providing infrastructures and services that we all rely on. However, tax touchpoints are often designed for the system rather than the user – the processes and traceability around tax, as well as how it contributes to our shared spaces and society can often feel complex, opaque, or invisible to the individual. Could we reimagine our relationship with it? And how might our connected environments offer new ways for us to interact with them?