Hi, I’m Andi.
For those of you who don’t know me, I was a Local Leader in Vancouver and New York, joined the board in 2019, and served as President from 2021 – 2022 before stepping down in 2023 when Dean Broadley took over.
Dean put in a huge effort at the end of 2023 to lead us in understanding what happened and what we could do about it. As of early 2024 Dean has had to step away. In his place I will be serving as interim President as we continue to take care of the organization.
During our radio silence we have been working hard to understand the breadth of the situation we are facing and bring clarity to what our options are and what comes next. This is no small feat with only a small group of volunteers and a holiday season to get through. I understand how frustrating this has been for you. The break in communications is not from us trying to hide or because we didn’t care, but because we were trying to understand and make things right.
For the last several months many volunteers have been putting in time to support the organization. My work has focused on operations—mainly, tending to the financial side of things and managing ticket holders. Ana Domb, the current vice president, has been working on all our legal matters. Gilles Demarty has been instrumental in overhauling our tech stack to be super lean, Amanda Lim has been working tirelessly on our communications effort, Boon Chew has been a jack-of-all trades support system, and Birgit Geiberger has been a pillar of strength for the community.
Where things stand
In the events leading up to and after the cancellation of Interaction 24, we uncovered significant debt that put us in the unfortunate position of being unable to issue refunds.
Over the last few months, our efforts have been zeroed in on two things:
- understanding how this happened, and
- figuring out what can be done.
What we’re doing
I’ll start with what we can do.
While we cannot offer you a monetary refund, we have been working with our amazing community and partners to figure out a way to make this right. For everyone holding an Interaction 24 ticket, we are putting together a list of offerings you can redeem your ticket for.
Highlights include Play Up Your Impact, a 1-day workshop for designers who want to increase mutual intelligibility between design and business by showing and predicting the impact of their work, Rosenfeld’s Advancing Research conference, and mentorship by the one and only Brenda Laurel.
You can view the most up-to-date list of offerings here.
How we got here
In an effort to take accountability, and as a way for us to reflect on what went wrong, here is what we can share right now.
We started the Interaction Design Association as a non-profit organization back in 2005 when we wanted to extend community building to bigger scale events, like the yearly Interaction Conference, the Education Summit, Interaction Design Day (IxDD), Student Design Challenge (SDC), and the Interaction Awards. The event that was IxDA’s primary source of revenue, however, was the yearly Interaction conference. Funds from Interaction Week formed the bulk of covering the Executive Director’s salary, contractors, our tech stack, and other operational expenses.
The COVID-19 crisis significantly impacted our overall operating budget. When the pandemic hit and everything shifted online, this revenue stream took a significant hit.
We weren’t the only ones impacted. The conference industry has also changed post-pandemic and macroeconomic factors have played a big role. In speaking with other conference organizers we have learned they are also seeing similar patterns. Budgets are tighter, L&D spending is down, and people have varying levels of comfort with travel and in-person gatherings.
Throughout the pandemic and the two online conferences we held in 2021 and 2022, we somehow managed to make things work. Cash resources dwindled, but the vaccines had become available and in-person convening became possible again. We were excited: going back to the in-person format of the conference held the promise of restoring our business model and keeping the organization afloat.
By the late summer of 2023, we started making operational and logistical decisions that would allow the organization to run super lean, increasing its focus on the community, which has always been the foundation of the organization. 2023 was our 20th year in existence and in many ways, it felt right to be returning to our roots.
The economic crisis of 2023 hit hard and lasted longer than expected. This did little to relieve the macroeconomic headwinds facing the conference space. This was when we made the impossibly hard decision to cancel Interaction 24, while in parallel we uncovered outstanding debt that had not been reported on our financial statements. The funds to repay ticket holders were not available.
We are still in the process of going through financial statements, bank statements, physical mail, and other accounts from the last 10 years to understand what happened. We will continue to share and be transparent as possible with the community as we move through the challenges facing the organization.
What happens now
We’re working round the clock to finesse the redemption process with ticket exchanges: as I write this, I’m also updating a constantly evolving list of design leaders who’ve stepped forward and offered their coaching, mentoring, and workshops to our ticket holders.
If you’d like to redeem your ticket for one of the offerings above, please fill out this form here.
Not seeing something that fits? Fill out the form anyway and let us know what you are looking for and we’ll see what we can do. We’re refining this solution as we go, so please forgive us if the process seems clumsy and unfinished. And of course—if you have any ideas on how we can do this better, please let us know. We’ve created a mailbox for this specific purpose: IxD24cancellation@ixda.org.
I know that there might be ticket holders who might compare what they paid with what we’re offering in this exchange plan. We are doing our best to give the most value in these courses—some of these individuals are amongst the highest echelons of talent in interaction design, and we’ve selected the offering with the same curation we would give an Interaction Week program.
I am also aware that for many ticket holders, they’d rather have their money back. I wish (as do the rest of the board) that we could have made this happen—in the months that have passed since the cancellation of Interaction 24, it may have seemed like our silence was deafening. But we were paddling hard under the water, fighting against the inevitable conclusion our debt has led us to. For coming up short, I am sorry. We are sorry.
Andrea Mignolo
on behalf of the IxDA board (Ana, Sami, Pablo)
