Discover our Finalists and Winners

Hackaball is a connected object that brings together the imagination of children, game creation and the basic mechanics of programming. The project is designed to allow children to create games together, fostering an environment that shows children that coding can be fun, social and creative.

“Heal Tutu” is a family interactive product that educates about emergency prevention through interactive picture books and smart toys.On the one hand, we design original story picture books, grading information and shaping child-friendly contexts to effectively help young children understand the role of situations and their own roles to help them understand and cope with the changes caused by the new crown epidemic; on the other hand, we design smart dolls, and young children trigger dotted visual changes and voice announcements by giving the dolls nucleic acid, vaccinations, and hand washing, so that the ” sick” bunny doll back to health. Through direct perception and practical operation, children are familiarized with the typical behavioral scenarios in an epidemic.

Story Tree is a project that encourages children to express themselves and create their own stories. In this project, our mission statement is to establish an appealing storytelling experience for children and guide them to create their own stories. Through telling stories, exercise children’s imagination and expression ability, guide them to develop the habit of thinking and creating, and establish a closer family relationship through parent-child interaction.

Every 30 seconds, someone in the US is hospitalized for heart failure. Once admitted to the hospital, there is an extremely high probability sufferers will be readmitted within the first 30 days of discharge. The disease becomes a steep downward slope from which patients struggle to gain control in their life and lifestyle.

Postpartum Depression (PPD) is the most common complication of childbirth – affecting 1 in 7 women in the US. Women are more likely to experience emotional difficulties following the birth of a baby than at any other time in their life. PPD also has a significant impact on the emotional, behavioral and intellectual development of the child. Recognizing its importance, the US task force recommends all mothers to be screened for PPD, yet less than half of health professionals routinely do so.

Government websites have a wealth of information but are often hard for citizens to navigate to find the answer to their specific questions. As a citizen, when you visit a government website with a question in mind, chances are you want a quick answer and a simple explanation, so you can be on your way. Unfortunately, this is not how the experience usually goes. On most govt websites, a lot of the time, you run into things like bad navigation, broken links, old content, and information that's hard to understand. Basically, a website rich with information isn't useful if the information cannot be easily accessed. Hard to use govt websites are frustrating for both citizens and City Hall. Honolulu’s city staff spends a lot of time answering phone calls from frustrated citizens who find the city website so unmanageable that calling for the information is inevitably easier. Honolulu Answers (answers.honolulu.gov) is a new approach to make it easier for people to get quick answers to their questions about city information and services. It's an open-source website that is citizen-focused, question-driven, and simplifies the govt website experience with a clean, easy-to-navigate design.

Research shows that a great number of cosmetics and body care products contain hormone-altering chemicals that can seriously harm your health. But information is sparse and difficult to access. How can you remember what to look for when you don't even know how to pronounce the chemicals? The Norwegian Consumer Council wanted to inform the consumers about these dangers without creating the feeling of effortlessness that press stories and campaigns about product dangers often do. At the same time, they wanted to activate them in a battle against the cosmetics industry to rid dangerous products from the shelves. We created 'Hormone Check' - an application on your smartphone - that enables you to check cosmetic products in the store before you buy them.

The ʻI Want To Beʼ course is a 2-month after-school program for 12-15 year olds, designed to open the minds of children in Ghana to the career opportunities around them. The class, led by a teacher, takes children on a trip of (self) discovery through company visits, interviews, talent quizzes, and group assignments. An interactive computer application supports the class, tracking kidsʼ progress and showcasing companies and careers available in their communities. Children in Ghana have a narrow view of career options. When researching kidsʼ ambitions, most children told us they wanted to be a ʻdoctorʼ or ʻlawyerʼ and that they didnʼt want to be a ʻdrug dealerʼ or ʻbank robberʼ. In reality, most children leave school at 16 and take a low-paying job to help out with the family finances. This course gives children and their parents the chance to explore realistic career goals and understand paths to achieve them. As a result, children and families may reach higher in terms of education and career and contribute to the long-term skills needed to develop Ghana – and eventually other developing nations.

An International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is crucial for identifying bank accounts across countries. It includes a country code, indicating the account's country. However, in the EU, while businesses must legally accept any EU country's IBAN for transactions or payroll, some still prefer local IBANs. This preference impacts expatriates, digital nomads, and global citizens who often reside in one EU country but have a bank account from another, leading to issues in receiving salaries, paying bills, or accessing local services.

Similar to how GPS technology helps people to navigate physical infrastructure, the IBM Cloud Infrastructure Visualizer maps out virtual network infrastructure and converts it into an interactive map. This birds-eye view allows users to visualize how resources are interconnected, how are they configured, and suggests actions to take in case something isn’t working as expected. With this tool, IT Administrators will no longer be stuck navigating their virtual infrastructure and instead, they can focus their energies on other tasks that require their technical expertise more and bring value to their enterprises.

The list. The bottomless one you make every day full of frustrating, repetitive tasks. What if you could clear it and get work done faster? It’s possible, with IBM Watson Orchestrate™, a 2022 CES Innovation Award Honoree, featuring groundbreaking technology designed to free you to up to pursue more “want-to-dos.”

There are currently over 65 million people displaced worldwide, the highest number since World War II. Last year the UN’s migration body, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) attended to the welfare of over 5.2 million people. Although access to healthcare is a basic human right, the growing number of refugees and migrants is making it increasingly difficult to provide support on the ground. Inspired by the on-going European refugee crisis, Frontend volunteered to work with IOM to review their service provisioning and design a “Future Vision for Migrant Healthcare”. Reimaging medication labelling is a central part of this project.

We are entering this project into the Engaging category as this website will play a major role in improving how migrants engage with Immigration New Zealand throughout their Immigration journey.

The Inc. 5000 Marketplace is a virtual world created for the Inc. 5000 Vision Conference where attendees could meet other attendees, share ideas and make lasting connections. The Marketplace is the first-of-its-kind, virtual experience specially themed for the conference.We integrated Inc. 5000’s history of honoring the fastest-growing private companies in America by designing the world around a fictitious Main Street, the heart of the Marketplace. Here, honorees from all over the country converged to walk the red carpet, play a round of golf, socialize at the virtual bar, take pictures at the art gallery and challenge one another with social games at the recreation center.The Marketplace combines the beauty of the real world, walking down the street with a friend chatting, with the power of a virtual world — where people from all over can immediately be present and explore. We achieve this through playful design, integrating game technologies and enabling all attendees to participate.Honorees poured glasses of bubbly at home and then joined in the fun with their live-streaming avatars. They bumped into friends on Main Street, popped into the local art gallery to add their photos to a mosaic, and wandered into the local bar to play trivia quizzes together. Finally, honorees stopped by the Inc. 5000 theater to celebrate each other’s accomplishments with a group photo. The challenge was to successfully create a virtual version of attending an event, where chance meetings and side conversations make the night that much more fun and interesting.

Housekeeping is a very big deal for hotels. It is by far the largest and most expensive department. With rising labor costs, complex operations, and high employee turnover, it remains a top challenge in the hotel industry. Housekeeping operations include several pain points for the users involved.

Designed for portable, uninterrupted monitoring during in-hospital transport and at the bedside, IntelliVue X3 provides an intuitive smart-phone-style operation that quickly and easily enables continuous monitoring during transport for the most critical patients.

Built to incite curiosity and to change people’s concept of a periodic table, Interaction Cubes brings the elements to life.Using images and videos of each element in experiments and in everyday products, the users can see the elements not only as they imagine them in classroom lectures, but connecting with them. The aim is to bring the elements closer to the user’s lives.For users who have never had contact with the subject, Interaction Cubes provides a playful and pleasant first contact with chemistry and the periodic table.Part of a traveling exhibit, it is built with a modular aluminum structure, reaching public from several states.

Interactive Play at Sesame Street Land is a brand-new experience at SeaWorld, Orlando, with twelve interactive opportunities for kids to explore the show’s iconic neighborhood like never before. For many families, a day at a theme park is usually spent trying to corral children from touching everything. At Sesame Street Land it’s not only encouraged, but kids are at the heart of the land’s design.

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.

Iuvo is a kit of stand-alone smart modules, sensors and actuators that perceive their layouts and physical configurations and compile parts of the code. It supports creatives in designing and prototyping interactive artifacts.Iuvo is a tool designed for creatives without a background in coding or electronics. It is a further step towards the abstraction of prototyping boards currently available in the market; circuits and textual code are replaced with snap-fits and visual programming.It is a physical product and also a service where the projects created are automatically updated on the web and available to other users. Thus the content is generated continuously and everyone can benefit from other people's achievements.People can start learning through a system based on hands-on activities, rewards and challenges.Using Iuvo, anyone with an idea of an interactive project has the opportunity to make it by combining existing projects in a smooth and straightforward way. This said, it is still possible to start from scratch, using the visual language provided that can be directly manipulated in the browser-like editor.It aims at facilitating makers in developing their ideas by providing a learning experience rather than a learning experience rather than a technological tool.

HOAS Pasila, located in Central Helsinki, provides a home for 250 foreign students. The residents are mostly European exchange students who come to study at one of the higher education institutions surrounding Helsinki. For many of them, the building is their first home as well as their first taste of Finland. The building is a 1970’s architectural gem, which was falling into disrepair. The lack of feeling of ownership led to some problems - like misuse of the building and its facilities. Our challenge was to make this building feel like home. With a little colorful chalkboard paint and some bold typography, we made the interiors part of the architecture and a vibrant space for living. We painted the hallways from floor to ceiling, turning them into chalkboards, instead of forbidding writing on the walls, we began promoting it. As a result, the building became an interactive participant in the student community: “talking” to its residents, encouraging them to get to know each other and do things together, creating a unique environment they could call their own.

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.

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.

In 2013, a staggering 20% of the global population, or more than one billion people live without electricity. Vast rural areas in Africa and Asia are without power, limiting access to education, health, safety, and social mobility. Access to electricity has an immediate and tangible impact.

In a truly e-commerce and on-demand based economy, more than 25 million US workers perform material handling activities: they move our goods and mine our raw materials, construct our buildings, and create the energy needed to power our society. Last year US companies spent $60bn on lifting related injuries, the most expensive cause of injury in the US, most of which is preventable. Most injuries happen due to cumulative trauma on the spine and surrounding muscles, caused by repetitive bad biomechanics when lifting.

Play is a free, explorative and iterative process to discover new meaning and is an important element for innovation. For children, it is unstructured, free and open-ended play through which they can develop their own creativity and interests. However, parents are increasingly underestimating the value of play while prioritising more structured activities and academic performance, a trend which is causing an increase in mental health issues in today’s youth.

During their treatment, many child cancer patients are isolated for medical reasons. During this period, they often feel quite well, and are very willing to play and to make contact with peers, but because they are not allowed to leave their rooms, they have no way to do so. Direct contact and play with peers is crucial for normal social development, but in some cases, isolation can take up to 4 months, which roughly disrupts this normal social development.

There are 2.7 million obese children in the USA (http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html). Children who are overweight have very few tools to help them be in control of their life.

LEGO Life of George combines creative LEGO building with app games for your smartphone. This unique combination of physical building and digital games is part of an emerging new toy category called App Toys. Life of George is a visionary example of LEGO's mission to inspire the builders of tomorrow by inventing the future of play. The bricks included in the set are the good old LEGO bricks, which have not changed for the past 50 years but continue to remain relevant to kids in this new combination with the latest smartphone technology

Our project, macroinvertebrates.org, leverages an emerging class of gigapixel image technology to make the process of learning to see and identify insects more visual and engaging, without sacrificing scientific detail.

In Uganda, the poor have limited financial options. Without birth certificates or national IDs, there is no identity or credit history. The poor are invisible to formal institutions. Invisibility means that when farmers need to plant crops they have no credit to buy seeds, or when a family member is ill they have no savings to pay for treatment.

What happens in the current political news reading experience is users will subscribe and read the news and the media based on their interests. What the worst is, to improve the stickiness and catch up user’s attention, companies also use the algorithm to feed the news, which fits the user’s interests. Over time, it creates a filter bubble or echo chamber, in which users could only receive the information which they believe, causing the intensification of the political polarization.

In 2014, The City of New York issued a Request for Proposal that called on the technology and media community to reimagine the City’s obsolete payphone infrastructure, and bring free public Wi-Fi to the streets of New York to help bridge a growing digital divide. As a result, a groundbreaking public-private partnership formed between the City of New York and a consortium of private companies to launch LinkNYC in January 2016, the largest and fastest free public Wi-Fi network in the world. Replacing more than 7,500 outdated payphones, each Link delivers free high-speed gigabit Wi-Fi, phone calls, USB ports for device charging, a touch screen tablet for internet browsing and wayfinding, 911 emergency button, and a platform for civic and commercial applications, bringing connectivity and digital touchpoints to every community and commercial street corner across New York City.

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. Just as everyday items find simple ways to inform us – like the moving hands of a clock or the whistle of a kettle – this series shows how to stay up-to-date with digital information while maintaining moments of calm.

The HP Live UI: App-Assisted Printer Setup is the UX design for an app assisted and guided set-up experience for HP printers as part of the larger HP Smart App. The app-assisted printer setup instructions were developed to guide users, step-by-step, in loading paper, installing ink, and additional tasks by utilizing detailed 2D animations and translated instructions—a big improvement over printed instructions which only provide static illustrations. This new UX provides a robust instructional experience, eliminating ambiguity and potential frustration for users during printer setup. It also presents the OS-detected language, so users don't have to search for their particular text translation.

LoopLoop is an interactive music toy for Sifteo cubes. LoopLoop uses hyper- minimal visuals and rich, smile-making sounds to let anyone make music without knowing a thing about music. Because of the Sifteo cubes' 1.5" screen, it might just be the world's smallest music sequencer. Stimulant was the only third-party design and development agency engaged by Sifteo to create a launch game for the Sifteo Intelligent Play platform.

Given the current global movements to quell diversity it’s apparent that, as designers, we could be doing something about it. So we asked: How could we help celebrate culture and diversity, rather than suppress it? Considering the many ways we could go about helping to change the conversation, we recognized an opportunity space within the emerging world of Voice UI. Given the trajectory of Voice UIs—looking beyond seemingly inconsequential interactions like adding things to calendars, turning on lights, and triggering music—we envisioned a tool that could actually help immigrant parents raise their children as American while maintaining a meaningful connection to their native culture.

Lotza.io is a review site and an online community carefully designed to cater to individual needs, where users can contribute their opinions on subscription services and direct-to-consumer products. The platform boasts a unique emotional-based rating system that tracks sentiment over time, enabling users to express their feelings about a brand over time. The platform provides a breadth of different media - from text to video to audio - to allow people to express themselves in the way that they feel most comfortable. Partners also benefit from Lotza's contextual feedback, enabling them to enhance their product offerings. Finally, Lotza finds the most relevant online products and subscription services that match an individual’s personal tastes.

Lumen tries to explore a new paradigm for interactivity and immersion. Imagine using Lumen inside a museum, an otherwise static/one sided experiences turns into an interactive experience that immerses you into the story. A visitor uses this enchanted flashlight to bring the exhibits to life, and they get to hear the story directly from the exhibit.

As a society multitasking on Smartphones increasingly, the way we communicate, shop, bank, watch TV and work has been transformed. Despite many benefits over traditional analogue tools, some are frustrated by the inefficiency of certain tasks and the inefficiency of moving between apps, interrupting flow and increasing the cognitive load of simple tasks. As you leave the app you are working in, your attention is focused on distracting menu systems instead of the task at hand. The average person uses 25 apps per week and one in five times they use a device, they open at least three of those apps.

Material Design is Google’s open-source design system that serves as the foundation for Android 13. Our latest version, Material You, enables designers and developers to easily build beautiful, usable interfaces. In reimagining the interaction patterns and visual language of Material Design, the team wanted to expand the discourse of design systems beyond usability and consistency, ultimately asking: what if form followed feeling? When we created Material You, we explored possibilities and polarities of scalable UI systems, arriving at more flexible color, shape, typography, and motion ranges for app makers to build with. The new system is expressive and surprising, without compromising UX best practices. To make our system feel more alive and customizable, we tested the limits of conventional UX beliefs – those long held beliefs and modernist paradigms, such as predictable = usable, and we pushed on inherited one-size-fits-all models for manufacturing hardware and software. The team that made Material You imagined a system for adaptable, expressive, personal experiences that work for you…whomever “you” are.

In September 2012, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Quartier des Spectacles announced that Megaphone, a project imagined by Moment Factory, had been chosen following a call for ideas sent out in April 2012. Artists, collectives and production companies from all fields had been invited to submit a proposal for an interactive installation that would spark reflection on how to reconcile the individual and the group. In addition to its unique character and plastic qualities , Megaphone seduced the jury with its urban and polemical spirit, and its potential to give anonymous urban dwellers an opportunity to shine by allowing them to speak out in a public space. The project engendered a wealth of ideas and knowledge, and the creative team sought to ensure that the technology used would generate imagery that matched the words being spoken . The Megaphone project inspired visual artists to push the limits of vocal recognition technology—which is still in its infancy—in order to find creative ways of representing multiple voices and images, all while ensuring both artistic cohesion and the success of an experiment premised on the interaction between human beings and machines.

MetaCancer is an organization that is built on helping people with advanced stage cancer. MetaCancer has worked for many years building a compassionate user community and programs to support them. MetaCancer was technologically delinquent. Their old bulletin board system was the furthest thing from inviting. Partnering with the Center for Expressive Arts, MetaCancer developed a program that illustrated the healing capabilities of art as participants expressed their personal experiences through painting and poetry. MetaCancer needed a vision on how to best use technology to leverage all they had learned about their community over the years, and give them an experience that was empowering and trustworthy. Designed and built with mobile in mind, Mosaic has the simplicity of a journal with the richness of a photo or paint application. Mosaic juxtaposes technology and art for a therapeutic and empowering community experience. It represents every user’s personal journey through a challenging time in life.

Art museums have long served as epicenters of cultural heritage, human experience, and social gathering. In recent decades, however, new competition for our time and attention has arisen in the form of arcades, malls, and home theaters, not to mention a never-ending stream of digital diversions. Celebrating its 100th year, The Minneapolis Institute of Art rebranded itself as Mia seeking to reengage the public with its world-class permanent collection and world-traveling special exhibits.

One of the greatest shortcomings of human-centered design is its lack of guidance on how to include diversity as part of the design process. Which human, exactly, belongs in the center? Most designers end up using their own abilities and experience as a baseline for their designs. This problem is even more pronounced for the predominantly young and able-bodied designers that work in technology. The result is products that work well for people with similar abilities and resources, but end up largely excluding everyone else. This is especially true for roughly 1 billion people on the planet with disabilities.

Midas is an accessible gaming controller which can turn any object or surface touched into a control interface. Designed to improve the gaming experience for people living with Muscular Dystrophy (MD), Midas acknowledges the lack of inclusive gaming hardware for people living with musculoskeletal disabilities. It challenges the idea of a traditional controller by proposing a solution which caters to an individual’s experience of MD, unique even within a similar diagnosis.

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.

MixDown is a digital service for young adults to engage with radio in an innovative way. The service allows youth to express themselves by creating short audio mash-ups using radio clips, repurposing and mixing the content with personalized messages.

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.

Recent political events have highlighted a deep disconnect between society and government. Internationally, people have taken to the streets to protest, or used their vote at the ballot box to voice their dissatisfaction with ‘the establishment’. The problem facing policymakers is no less challenging – with the breakdown of traditional media and the rise of ‘fake-news’, it’s harder than ever to communicate effectively with citizens resulting in a breakdown in civic dialogue and an erosion of trust in our public institutions.