Discover our Finalists and Winners

TAMI is a tangible interface that facilitates learning the basics of trigonometry. As opposed to the traditional way of teaching trigonometry (and mathematics in general), TAMI enables an intuitive, playful, and collaborative approach to learning.

Education for children with visual impairment has always been more expensive than for sighted children. Two primary reasons are scarcity of special educators and affordable tactile learning material. Of the 19 million children with visual impairment, 90% live in low income settings and are trapped in a cycle of poverty due to limited access to education, and consequently, employment opportunities.

TactorBots is a haptic toolkit to empower designers to explore emotional robotic touch. It contains eight plug-and-play wearable tactor modules that render a series of social gestures driven by servo motors. Our specialized web GUI allows easy control, modification, and storage of tactile patterns to support fast prototyping. Taking emotional haptics as a “design canvas” with broad opportunities, TactorBots is the first “playground” for designers to try out various tactile sensations, feel around the nuanced connection between touches and emotions, and come up with creative imaginations.

The Teaching Channel website creates a much-needed resource for time-strapped teachers in all stages of education and all types of schools, helping them find useful examples of teaching methods along with the support materials they need to implement these methods into their own classrooms. Teaching Channel enables them to get support and inspiration from their peers, with the eventual aim of instilling pride in those who are engaged in what is often a difficult but essential profession. It reinforces the importance of the craft of teaching by delivering content in a high-quality experience not often associated with educational resources on the web. We also realize that the discussion and information that enables teachers to improve their craft carries the most meaning when shared with other teachers that share similar teaching environments such as class size, subject of focus, or grade level. This insight forms the foundation for the design of the community features within the website, ensuring that teachers can easily find other teachers like them, and "follow" and learn from these similar teachers within discussions sparked by the video content.

Teemo’s goal is to bring “fitness fun with friends” to the large, stressed-out, and underserved portion of the population who want to exercise but don’t. Conceived, funded, designed, developed, and launched by Ammunition in partnership with Bonnier R&D, Teemo is a fitness adventure game that combines proven training techniques, social connection, and entertaining adventures to help people get and stay moving. From a design perspective, Teemo is above all an experiment in moving beyond conventional (often cynical) approaches to gamification and social computing. From the start, we set our sites on something better than points schemes, leaderboards, peer pressure, life logging, and self-quantification. Ultimately, we took inspiration from the notion that the greatest source of happiness and motivation is caring, stable, and supportive connections to close family and friends. Teemo’s big idea is so simple, we think it’s radical. Getting together with friends to have fun in ways that also happen to increase overall fitness.

When we try to translate our own experiential geography on a flat surface we often get puzzled. Maps, even online and mobile ones, seem to us hostile, deliberately complex, sometimes cryptic. The reason is that we cannot communicate with them. They always look the same. They know everything, but they do not learn. They are fixed and identical for everyone. And as long as they get more complex, with layers upon layers of information constantly added to them, they become more and more confusing. Terrarium is the solution to the maps’ ineptitude in making themselves understandable, enabling us to communicate with them. It allows the creation of personalized paths, giving directions for the easier route based on the user’s knowledge, which is not possible with other navigation systems, and integrates suggestions in the path-generation process. It adds sharing possibilities, which unlike existing services allow real-time collaboration on creating maps and location databases, and sharing not only places but also paths, itineraries and whole maps. It finally joins together in a single mobile application all this functions, using a graphic interface that remains simple and intuitive in spite of the complexity of the system.

Color of Life offers visitors a unique perspective on the natural world: vibrant live animals, shimmering scientific specimens, and immersive interactive exhibits invite attendees to touch, see and experience the ways that nature’s colors help us understand and appreciate the health of ecosystems and the interconnectedness of life on our planet.

The Colour of Resilience is a physical and interactive exhibit launched at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January 2023. It’s the first art project in history to have teams of refugee teaching artists painting canvas murals in four different refugee camps and displaced communities across four continents. Teaching artists painted with displaced communities and children to tell the stories of where they came from, how they got to where they are, and what they dream of for the future.

Since 2002, the Institute for Emerging Issues (IEI) has engaged North Carolina’s citizens, bringing people together to turn ideas into action. Experts at facilitating face-to-face communication, they wanted to extend their impact using digital tools. They envisioned an exhibit designed to educate North Carolinians about four of the state’s core concerns­–Education, Environments, Economy, and Health–and inspire and enable them to collaborate on these issues. Working with IEI and our partners, we created the Emerging Issues Commons at North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library.

The End of the Day is a public audio installation that can only be played at sunset. It’s a guided audio experience about a moment many years from now, when you are looking back and reflecting on a life well-lived –about reclaiming a good future as a brave and hopeful act.

The seat designer is a rich interactive web based seat map and ticket creation management tool. It enables Eventbrite organizers to design and manage their own seat maps, set a selling order, create and assign tickets for any reserved seating events they host.

When Nike Basketball came to us to help them deliver on their mission to help young athletes elevate their performance, our first step was to understand how kids try to improve their game. Our ethnographic research revealed a key insight: fledgling players hone their skills by watching their basketball idols, and mimic their signature moves in order to appropriate pros’ moves and personalize them to suit their own unique style. At the inaugural World Basketball Festival at the legendary Rucker Park in Harlem, we created The Film Room, a live event where aspiring players not only learn from the very best, they make the moves on their own, and learn about their performance. The Film Room is part green screen, part half court, 100% education. Kids watch a pro performing a signature move, and with the help of Nike coaches, analyze each step. Next, they try to perform the move themselves on the half-court. As they perform the move, HD cameras capture their movements and a custom-built algorithm breaks down each frame. Within minutes, participants receive a personalized 18 x 24” Nike Basketball poster, starring themselves.

S7 Airlines flies to over 900 destinations in partnership with oneworld. To inspire Russians to go out there and explore the wonders of our world, we launched a unique interactive project. We allowed people to fly to the place of their dreams using only the power of their imagination and turned their brains into game controllers using neurotechnology. If participants were able to steer a mind-controlled virtual plane to their dream destination, then S7 Airlines would actually fly them there.

Before the late-1990s, dial-up was the standard way of connecting to the Internet. Accessing the Internet was a conscious action that involved negotiation between family members living in the same house. The nostalgic dial-up modem sound of Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch… was the bridge between the analogue and the digital. Today, we are living in a world where the Internet and connected devices have become ubiquitous. The excitement around connecting to websites has disappeared and the underlying mechanism of the internet is hidden.

Eurosport is the largest provider of sports content in Europe and streams on more devices than any other channel, in 54 countries and 24 languages. Eurosport partnered with us to reimagine the sport viewing experience.

A pavement brings to life an old emirati tradition in a way that gets strangers to create music together. For centuries, Dubai fishermen made a living diving into the sea looking for pearls, known as the “local gold”. Pearl Divers is an interactive plaza dotted with pearl-like sensors that play music with participant’s shadows. Paying tribute to this ancient tradition, passersby trigger original Bayati and Hijaz melodies, bringing magic and connection to the heart of an emerging neighbourhood.

Equinox prides itself on being a fitness innovator. More than just a gym, it’s the lifestyle brand for people who are laser-focused, type-A and in pursuit of perfection. With this in mind, we set out to provide members with an immersive cycling experience that tapped into their “always be better” mentality, and inspired the kind of competition and community that give boutique cycling studios their edge.

New York City’s municipal website, NYC.gov, serves more than 35 million unique visitors per year and gets over 250 million page views annually. It’s the primary resource for New Yorkers to accomplish tasks such as paying parking tickets or determining the right school for their child, and for the city to share its initiatives and accomplishments with its citizens. It had not been redesigned since 2003 and, over time had become a disorganized hodgepodge of text and links. It had become difficult for users to find what they needed, and they were increasingly calling 311 (the city’s public help line). The city had already started to invest in a new technology infrastructure and make city data more open and accessible – this was the final effort to bring more power, information, and transparency to the people of New York. Our goal was to create a more intuitive, usable, and efficient experience that would be easy to search and browse, and a delight to use. The experience had to beat accessibility standards and work in many different languages. At a higher level, our goal was for NYC.gov to set the standard for the way governments communicate with and empower their people.

Middle school education can be very challenging for students. They get introduced to a lot of new mathematical and scientific concepts that are often abstract in nature and difficult to understand. The current education system is designed as a one size fits all solution, with a set way to teach and learn these concepts. This approach contrasts with facilitation and letting learning happen organically. What if these concepts could be made more fun and tangible? Would this help the students gain more confidence in learning these concepts, let them explore the subject matter more deeply, and help them develop their own reasoning behind them? The “Smart Lamp” addresses this opportunity space by creating a mixed-reality environment that brings together the advantages of both physical and virtual environments.

The Waste Land for iPad is the result of a year long collaboration between the poem’s publisher Faber and Faber, and Touch Press a digital publisher specialising in highly interactive books. Our aim was to bring the poem to a new audience and to use the special capabilities of the iPad to give that audience the tools to appreciate perhaps one of the greatest works of 20th Century literature. To that end we offer synchronised readings and performances of the poem by, among others, T S Eliot himself, Sir Alec Guinness and Fiona Shaw. We also provide 35 expert perspectives on the poem in the form of filmed interviews with Seamus Heaney, Jeanette Winterson and others. Extensive and detailed notes can be accessed to explain the many references and historic allusions. And Eliot’s original manuscript can be displayed, including Ezra Pound’s extensive edits and deletions, to show how the poem took shape. But at the core of the iPad edition is the poem itself, beautifully typeset and, with a quick turn of the device, uncluttered and carefully presented without embellishment.

Tink is a toolkit that allows kids to engage with familiar objects in new ways. The kit includes six sensors (light, sound, tilt, vibration, motion, temperature), six plugs, and an iPad application that connects the sensors with the plugs.

Of late, one of the biggest issues that India, the second most populous country of the world, is facing is of women safety. The country’s capital, New Delhi, has recently reported a high number of rape cases against women. Protests from citizens have lead to higher vigilance from the police to prevent such cases in the future.

Toot is an interactive toy designed for children aged between three and six years old. Toot wants, through tangible play, to create a new type of musical experience, where children can explore concepts like sequence and composition.

Toucan is a web service and application that offers AI-powered consulting tools, specifically designed to assist micro and small business owners, as well as individuals with disabilities such as visual impairments and cognitive disabilities, in accessing relevant information about global trades easily and affordably and unlock their potential in the global trade and the international marketplace. Through a chatbot-like interface that accepts both typed and voice commands, users can receive comprehensive text or voice-based analysis and information tailored to their needs. It support 133 language and can be integrated with E-commerce platform for generating marketing and product ideas based on their business using generative AI and Stable Diffusion.

TrafficBridge provides connections within and across organizations to assist network television advertising broadcast matches.

With a brief to explore innovations in the area of space design and placemaking, we decided to look at low-cost and low-entry-barrier solutions that would allow us to engage the local population in public consultations.

Navigating the social media landscape often means spending time with our personal devices instead of with each other. We use our fingertips to transmit bits and bytes across the world more readily than we use our bodies to transmit social energy across a room. Who, at some point, hasn’t wondered if this rushing stream of ephemeral posts is leading us toward an island of social isolation rather than a true community of friends?

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?

Data Cubed has developed a fully integrated electronic data capture platform and cross-platform app, designed using gaming mechanics and reward-driven behavior change to increase participation and improve retention for clinical trials. Data collection is fully automated, gamified, and engaging, using human centered principles and modern technology.

The project “Everyday Sounds of Dementia” aims to research the potential of sound and soundscapes in design of technology and services for people living with dementia. Research has demonstrated the cognitive and psychological benefits of music for people with dementia. In the Everyday Sounds of Dementia project, we further expand this body of knowledge by exploring the role of everyday sounds or non-musical ordinary sounds in evoking memories and conversations to provide meaningful social activity for people with dementia and their relatives. However, most audio-based technologies are inaccessible or difficult to use for people with dementia due to cognitive and physical disabilities. This project contributes to the positive well-being and quality of life of people living with dementia, and their caregivers, by supporting day-to-day functioning in their homes, and during times of transition to higher levels of care. It uses design-research and participatory approaches to develop interactive soundscapes (collages of everyday ambient sounds ) to calm, reduce agitation, stimulate, excite and engage people living with dementia in times of anxiety, stress or boredom, and promote meaningful activity in high-risk situations. The insights of this project have resulted in the Tumbler prototype, which is an accessible sound player for people with dementia to play everyday sounds and provide meaningful sound-based activity at home.

The U-Bot is a robot powered by ai behaviors and the aim is to make blind children aware of the space around them. The important phase of this project is been the research part focused on the available product on the market to help blind people have a better understanding of “orientation and mobility”.

In semi-developed and rural areas where infrastructure, lack of information, and restrictive notion of culture adversely impact pregnancy journeys and delivery outcomes, UMA is a pregnancy service that aims to empower pregnant persons and their ancillary support system.For the pregnant woman and her support system, the service leverages household resources and practices to inculcate medical adherence, proactive decision-making, and building help-seeking behaviours.

In New Orleans, music can easily be mistaken for a natural resource. But every note of every song is the product of a human being. Not only are these people often uncompensated for their work, they are often not fully understood. To fulfill its Clinton Global Initiative commitment, Insight Labs convened the second annual UX for Good event in New Orleans on behalf of these musicians.

UFOcus addresses the challenges faced by students, particularly those with attention disorders, in a traditional classroom setting. It proposes an interactive and participatory learning system for Primary and middle School classrooms. Using light signals, projections and sound cues to guide students through different stages of the lesson, ensuring they remain attentive and aware of their progress. Each student has access to tokens and tiles, allowing them to actively participate, answer questions, and engage with peers at appropriate times. The system also introduces ice-breaking activities and de-stressing games, encouraging both mental and physical involvement.

While most university alumni centers are heritage repositories celebrating the past, the Ford Alumni Center equally cultivates the future. As the new front door to the university, this dynamic building welcomes all visitors and immerses them in the pioneering spirit that defines the University of Oregon, providing equal parts inspiration and information. As the launching point for campus tours, thousands of prospective students will get their first impression of the Oregon experience in the Interpretive Center—a 2,000-square-foot space filled with media installations that fuel soaring dreams and invigorate appreciation for the history that defined this innovative institution’s culture. Nine towering “Oregon Cascades” serve stories, information, and artifacts; a large interactive “Alumni Table” recognizes every alum in the school’s history, and the “Entry Wall” reveals the day’s campus events while recognizing those whose contributions made the Ford Center possible.

Upstyle is an image-assisted text-to-image AI tool that empowers users to design fashion pieces with greater precision. By leveraging the GenAI power, users can conveniently discover and generate fashion styles from a well-organized archive and the trained AI model, which eliminates common user hassles like extensive browsing, downloading, and uploading efforts. Upstyle, has the potential to revolutionize sustainable fashion design by creating a streamlined circular ecosystem focused on smooth and cost- effective customization processes.

There are 1.8 billion population of Muslim, where the largest Muslim population resides in Indonesia. Muslims do their prayers five times a day, and they have to be clean to do their prayers. On Hadith Sahih Muslim, Prophet Muhammad said “Cleanliness is part of the imaan (faith)”

VISO's aim is to provide a transformative solution accessible to a broad audience, bringing attention to how in-car technology could be harnessed to enhance focus, rather than serve as a distraction.

Most automaker sites are glorified car brochures. Car configurators don’t help you find your dream car. They let you build a digital car that may or may not exist, then send you to dealerships with fingers crossed.

The Vaccine Administration Management Solution (VAM) provides capabilities for effective vaccine distribution, administration, and monitoring. ServiceNow is committed to leveraging the Now Platform to help states and healthcare providers convert vaccines into vaccinations as quickly as possible. The Now Platform and Vaccine Administration Management solution have been deployed in just days by some providers, using ServiceNow’s workflow technology to rapidly improve vaccine distribution, administration, and monitoring. VAM dramatically reduces wait time, operational overhead and eliminates overbooked appointments. Instead, users can select the date and time to receive their vaccination dose via a centralized booking system. For those who’d prefer to speak to someone, contact center agents can book appointments on behalf of recipients – with 100% confidence in the live scheduling data they’re accessing. Through the successful design and implementation of VAM across the globe, the ServiceNow platform has now enabled more than 20 million vaccinations and counting.

Vochlea is a revolutionary project to enable easy capture and expression of musical ideas. Expressing an idea is all about converting a thought into something that can be communicated to and understood by someone else. When it comes to music we are all capable of composition in our head, but few of us are able to outwardly express this music.

The ubiquity of security cameras in our world suggests we have become compliant being constantly recorded in public spaces. Yet privacy and data retention are hot topics and have made designers very much aware that their design choices affects what kind of data society we will become. In this current context, a growing group of designers worry about the dark side of automated data recording. This project explores ways in which recording data in public spaces can be used in a positive, constructive, and privacy-respecting way, to the benefit of the users of that space. We hope it can function as an antidote to the current (necessary, but often negatively framed) discussion on automatic data recording in public space.

In the midst of its worst drought in 500 years, designers in Smart Design’s San Francisco studio decided to help by designing a product that effectively influences residential conservation, reduces an individual’s water footprint, and adds meaningful value to people’s daily conservation efforts.

There are an estimated 285 million vision-impaired people worldwide. Sadly, the consequences of sight loss are often poverty, isolation, and depression. Of the estimated two million people living with sight loss in the UK, almost half say they would like to leave their homes more often.

We Remember invites visitors to tell their 9/11 stories as part of the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Visitors to the site enter a sound-proof booth, locate themselves on a world map and record and contribute their stories for use in the introductory exhibition of the permanent museum opening in 2012. These stories are also used to make the Explore 9/11 iPhone application, a mobile guide that features a seven stop walking tour of the area around the World Trade Center, accompanied by audio and photo narration, as well as an augmented reality mode in which photos from the site overlay the phone’s current camera view.

What The Block is a project which is all about engaging people through design to learn and discover the potential of new technologies. We started out with Blockchain, since designers working with Blockchain, we had been inundated with requests from colleagues, peers, clients, family, and friends to explain Blockchain – the problem was we couldn’t find any good existing material out there.

“Who, Like Me, Is Threatened?” is a unique interactive mirror experience that serves as an introduction to Spark of Conviction: The Global Human Rights Movement at Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights (CCHR). The gateway into the gallery both literally and figuratively, it helps visitors forge an emotional connection to difficult content, leaving an impression that stays with them long after they’ve departed the museum.

Throughout our lives, we amass a myriad of personal belongings, from the teddy bear we received at birth, to the new shoes we bought last week. As our belongings accumulate, it is inevitable for some items to stop serving us, whether it be a shirt that’s no longer our style, or an old toy we no longer play with. However, just because an item no longer serves us does not mean it cannot serve someone else. Whome helps pre-loved items find a home where they can be appreciated and cherished once again.

Windows Phone is the phone that puts people first, and makes it easier to stay close and connected to the people that matter to you. A person or group that you care about can be pinned right to the Start screen, and with Live Tiles, you can see a friend’s latest status update at a glance. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are built right in to the phone, so even a simple contact card comes alive with news about what your friends are doing, where they’ve checked in, and the photos they’ve posted. Staying in touch is easier, with SMS, Windows Messenger, and Facebook IM all in one unified messaging experience. When your friends comment on your Tweets or status updates, instead of chasing them down in different apps – now they come right to you, all in one place. Groups let you organize your social circles, so you can see what’s new with just a few people at a time, or start a new message to an entire group with a tap of a button. In a market obsessed with apps, Windows Phone is focused on making it easier to stay close and connected to people.

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.