The Blog

We’re honored to announce this year’s top winners for the second-annual Interaction Awards!

Tonight, from the GE sponsored Awards ceremony and party at Interaction|13 in Toronto, Canada, 21Balançoires, Daily tous les jours was awarded Best in Show, UX for Good: New Orleans, UX FOR GOOD was awarded People’s Choice, 100 BPM, by Maxime Dubreucq, Doris Feurstein, Shivanjali Tomar, Natalie Vanns and Umeå Institute of Design took home both Best Student and Best Concept.

“Interaction design was born in technology and business, but is growing up and leaving the nest. I can’t think of a more poetic example than our Best in Show winner, 21 Balançoires. It embodies the science of cooperation,” said Marc Rettig, 2013 Interaction Awards Jury Chair. “The design uses familiar play as an invitation to something surprising, something larger. That’s a glimpse of what can come from the interaction design point of view, which focuses on what happens between people, things, and places.”

A very special new award was also presented tonight, the Future Voice Award, selected by the jury chair and awarded in consultation with the entire jury. This year, Studio H: Bertie County by Project H was selected.

The Future Voice Award recognizes work demonstrating the profound potential of Interaction Design, which at its heart deals with the dynamics and depth of human relationship and conversation. The Studio H work tangibly demonstrates the spirit of the interaction award categories – optimizing, engaging, empowering, expressing, connecting, disrupting.

“Studio H demonstrates a way of designing with people rather than for them,” offered Rettig. “It represents a focus on a community’s abilities and relationships as explicit outcomes of design. In that way it is a ‘future voice’ for interaction design, and we’re celebrating that evidence of what Interaction Design could become.”

This evening, we celebrated a total of twenty five projects selected from hundreds of entries from 27 countries. These projects demonstrate exceptional design ranging from health-related products to interactive installations to new tools for civic participation.

“These winning projects clearly demonstrate the breadth, depth and impact of interaction design.” said Steve Baty, IxDA President. “They embody the material diversity of contemporary practice; the importance of both concept and craft; and the range of challenges being tackled by interaction designers. IxDA is thrilled to recognize these examples of excellence in interaction design.”

In selecting this year’s winners, our jurors engaged in long, thoughtful discussions, part of which are captured in the below video shorts:

We worked with filmmaker Christian Svanes Kolding and our sponsor Adobe TypeKit to create a collection of video shorts profiling all of our top winners. You can find them all here.

We want to thank everyone for participating this year, especially our kind sponsors Adobe TypeKit and GE. We look forward to seeing what’s in store for the 2014!

Full List of Awards:

Top prizes were awarded in the following categories: Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People’s Choice, and Best in Category for six categories. An international jury selected the category award winners, and the People’s Choice Award was chosen by online voting, A full list of our winners can be found here.