The Blog

We are very pleased to announce Leisa Reichelt and Amber Case have joined the 2016 Jury. Each is a luminary leader in one of the many ways interaction design impacts humanity.

As the Head of User Research at the UK Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office, Leisa Reichelt leads a team of user researchers who work in agile, multidisciplinary teams to help continuously connect the people who design public services with the people who use them. She is proud of helping to build a cross-government research community who have made a real difference in the design of services used by millions of people every day across the country. Leisa is in the process of relocating to Sydney where she will join the Digital Transformation Office of the Australian government to build a multidisciplinary team focused on transforming public service design there.

Many of you met Amber Case through her inspiring Interaction12 keynote “From Solid to Liquid to Air: Interaction Design and the Future of the Interface.” After establishing a Portland (Oregon) research center for ESRI, the California mapping company that bought her startup Geoloqi in 2012, Amber is now a Managing Director for the Tennessee-based company Healthways. She is building a Portland branch of the company, with a focus on the future of wellness and wearable computing. She speaks and writes about improving design technology through a concept called “Calm Technology” — a term that originated at the Xerox PARC research center in Palo Alto, California. In her own words, it describes technology that “gets out of your way and lets you live your life.” Her book on the subject will be published this fall by O’Reilly Media.

Leisa and Amber join design leaders Itamar Medeiros, Alok Nandi, Brenda Laurel, and Sudhir Sharma to complete the six-person international jury. This November, they will meet with Kim Goodwin, our 2016 Jury Chair, in New York City to select finalists and winners from among the short list that you, the IxDA global community, will have chosen through our peer review process. Sign up to be a peer reviewer.

Welcome, Leisa and Amber! On behalf of IxDA, we look forward to your comments and contributions in selecting the interaction design exemplars for 2016.

Make their job difficult: Enter today and share your story! Hurry, the deadline is September 13, 2015.