The Blog

Our friends from Wayfindr, last year’s Best in the Category Empowering and Best in Show, talk a little on how they approached their submission – that finally brought them on stage in Helsinki.

“With two team members with a background in Interaction Design, including our CEO Umesh Pandya, entering the Interaction Awards in 2015 just felt like the right thing to do. The submission required a video component, which allowed us the freedom to present our project in the way we wanted, with our own voices. We already had a video, which we made to communicate the concept of Wayfindr, and we used this as a starting point. We took this footage and refined the talking heads, to help tighten up the messaging, and then – with the help of a video editor – we came up with our submission video.

When we won the IxDA Awards 2016 for Best in Empowering and Best in Show it was a truly remarkable moment for all of us on the Wayfindr team. We have been working on the Wayfindr Open Standard for two years now and while we believe that what we are doing is important it was gratifying to see that other people believed in us as well.

Wayfindr’s mission is to empower people to navigate the world independently, so winning the Empowering award felt like a real acknowledgement of that mission. We have always been a driven team but this gave us an extra push to keep working hard to ensure that the Open Standard is adopted globally.

The IxDA Awards are important for drawing attention to all manner of innovations that are going on in the tech space. We met so many people who are doing amazing things to try and improve the world through technology and seeing their devotion to it felt like a reflection of our own.”