The Blog

Guest Post By Marc Rettig, 2013 Interaction Awards Jury Chair.

A new award: why?

The IxDA Interaction Awards take a view that’s pretty close to the trenches: people enter recent work, the jury choose winners worthy of recognition, and the result presents a snapshot of the current landscape of interaction design.

But we are moving across that landscape. You can see ways in which this year is different from the last year, and at the Interaction 13 conference there was lots of talk about trends that are going to change what we see in the Awards next year.

The Future Voice award steps back from the landscape of current work, and asks different questions. Instead of asking, “What exemplifies good interaction design this year and where is it going?,” it asks: “Where could we choose to go?” The Future Voice award is a way for us to recognize work that inspires us to lift our heads from the work immediately in front of us, and consider the view from a higher altitude, a further depth, and a more distant horizon all at once.

Choosing the recipient of the Future Voice Award.

The Future Voice Award is chosen by each year’s jury chair, in consultation with the rest of the jury and the Awards committee. It is selected not only from entries, but from anything in the world whether entered or not, as representative of the following statement:

This work deeply embodies the spirit of the interaction award categories – optimizing, engaging, empowering, expressing, connecting, disrupting. And it does something more: The Future Voice Award recognizes work that demonstrates the profound potential of Interaction Design, which at its heart deals with the dynamics and depth of human relationship and conversation. Recognizing its recipient celebrates evidence of what Interaction Design could choose to become.

The recipient of the 2013 Future Voice Award: Studio H Bertie County

I’ll let the video make the introduction: