The Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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