The Blog

We are very happy to announce Brenda Laurel and Sudhir Sharma will join our distinguished 2016 Jury. Both are pioneering practitioners and educators who have had — and continue to have — a tremendous impact on interaction design.

Brenda Laurel is well known as an early advocate for girl video game development, a pioneer in developing virtual reality, a public speaker, academic, consultant, and board member of numerous organizations. She has been a formative contributor to design education at U.C. Santa Cruz (Computational Media, Digital Arts and New Media), the California College of the Arts (Graduate Program of Design), Art Center College of Design (Graduate Media Design Program). She was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs, where she was co-author of a patent for a new UI for cable television and film. She has worked for Atari, co-founded game development firm Purple Moon, co-founded virtual reality company Telepresence Research, and has served as an interaction design consultant for numerous Fortune 500 companies. Brenda supports the theory of interactivity: the “degree to which users of a medium can influence the form or content of the mediated environment.”

Sudhir Sharma is the founder and president of Design India (India’s largest social community of professional designers) and is also Chief Editor/Publisher of POOL Magazine (for Design, Innovation and Art). He writes and lectures extensively, is an alumnus of the World Economic Forum’s World Design Council, and has been on the jury of several global awards programs. As a design industry leader, Sudhir manages projects across multiple design disciplines and believes passionately in the transformative power of design thinking.

Brenda and Sudhir join Itamar Medeiros and Alok Nandi on the 2016 Jury; one final pair of accomplished jurors will be announced shortly. The six-person jury will gather this November to meet in person with Kim Goodwin, our 2016 Jury Chair. The group will deliberate to select finalists and winners from among the short list that you, the IxDA global community, will have chosen through our peer review process (September 15-October 15). We invite you to be a peer reviewer: https://goo.gl/BCqxVF

Welcome, Brenda and Sudhir! On behalf of IxDA, we look forward to the unique perspective you bring to the discussion and selection process for the 2016 Interaction Awards.