The Blog

In just two weeks, submissions will close for the 2014 Interaction Awards. Will you be giving our Jury the opportunity to celebrate your work?

There is still plenty of time for you to submit. Enter now!

Here are some common misconceptions about the Awards. If you haven’t submitted yet due to any of these reasons, we’ll tell you why we think you should reconsider:

I work on an established product. Isn’t this for new products and services?

We want to celebrate impactful Interaction Design, be it with a new or established product/service. Maybe you’ve redesigned a part of your product; or perhaps you’ve incorporated something new into your service. Did the new work address the opportunity area? Have you seen impact? Pick a category and share your story!

I’m not an Interaction Designer. We have no one with that title working on our project.

It doesn’t matter what you are (or aren’t) called. Interaction Design is about designing a product or service that enables people to interact with an object, another person, a system, a service, and does so with impact to the opportunity area. What matters are these two things:

1. You have deep understanding of the people you’re making your product/service for, and your solution has great impact addressing an identified opportunity for them.

2. You should be able to say that your product or service is demonstrating at least one of the following categories:

“Our product/service is…”

Connecting:  Facilitating communication between people and communities.

Engaging:  Capturing attention, creating delight and delivering meaning.

Empowering:  Enabling people to go beyond their limits.

Expressing:  Encouraging self expression and/or creativity.

Disrupting:  Re-imagining completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets.

Optimizing:  Making daily activities more efficient.

I have a concept but I haven’t built it.

It’s ok! Are you able to demonstrate that your concept has impact? Just show that your concept shows potential impact to the people you’ve designed it for. Be it through prototyping or concept evaluation, impact on the opportunity area and the people you’re designing for is key.

I don’t have a glossy video, so why even bother?

This is not about production value; this is about your story. Bring your story to life. It can be as simple as sitting in front of the camera and telling us about your work and impact. You can show other people engaging with your product and service. You can bring your project process to life. It’s your chance to demonstrate impact beyond what your written words and images could do. Don’t be shy; turn the camera on! [Also – we don’t mind if videos are not in English. The written entry needs to be in English, but your video need not be.]

We don’t work for a big agency, and our project doesn’t have a big budget.

We encourage you to take a look at the finalists for 2012 and 2013. It’s commercial and concept. It’s a huge mix of big agency, small shop, in-house, consultancy, entrepreneur, not-for-profit and student work.

Overall, stop that dialog in your mind that might be saying your work couldn’t compare. It’s about looking at each project independently and evaluating how well the project met its objectives and delivered impact to its recipients. Your work is evaluated in and of itself, first and foremost. How do we choose finalists? It comes down to how well did any one project better create impact and address its audience over another. This allows the jury to look at projects as wide as a bicycle scheme meant to encourage biking and reducing auto congestion down to the smallest of interactions within a product.

Celebrate your work! Take pride, share your work with the world.