For the second year, the Interaction Awards jury deliberated online to select 18 projects as our 2022 Interaction Awards finalists. The finalists will be celebrated and winners revealed on 27 April during a live-streamed Interaction Awards ceremony. Congratulations!
CONNECTING
Facilitating communication between people and communities
Boby — enable bonding between premature infants and their parents
Kunstuniversitat Linz, Austria
Each year approximately 15 million babies are born preterm all around the World.
Bo.by is a solution that enables contact between parents and infants in the incubator at the distance. A device for parents and a mattress for an infant are connected to one another. Each of the devices is collecting, sends, and receives data such as touch, breast movement, vibration, heartbeat, body heat, or smell. Thanks to such both-way, enriched with senses communication Bo.by gives an opportunity to experience natural, prolonged, skin-to-skin bonding.
Open Door Museum
Carnegie Mellon University, United States
The origin of museums is the “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a literal cabinet owned by wealthy aristocrats to share their personal history through extraordinary objects. This narrow collection defined by wealth and class has persisted in museums today, where diverse perspectives are missing and visitors feel distant from the artifacts on display.
Open Door Museum is a modern cabinet of curiosities, where everyone can be a curator to define our collective identity. As the project received positive feedback from the public and holds unbounded potential for applications, we proudly submit our work to be considered for the Interaction Award.
Project Shasta — an audio tool for people with a story to tell
Adobe, United States
Project Shasta brings AI-powered audio recording and editing to the web.
A million stories wouldn’t quench humanity’s thirst for listening. Nor would a billion. There will never be enough stories. More people than ever wish to speak their story through podcasts. But, deciphering the intricacies of audio production is a buzzkill to many creators. Tools should inspire people to create, not discourage them from it. We built a tool that empowers anyone to tell their story through pro-sounding audio.
DISRUPTING
Re-imagining completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages, or markets
MusicTongue: Tongue-Training Game + Arcade
National Taipei University of Technology + Taipei Medical University, Taiwan
MusicTongue is a tongue-training game App designed for middle-aged and elderly people. The purpose of the training is to retard the decline of mouth function, reduce the risk of choking and improve the quality of life of the elderly.
In order to meet the needs of elderly residents who live in long-term care facilities or are not familiar with the operation of cell phones, we designed a nostalgic game machine version of MusicTongue using cardboard boxes, the operation is the same, but the screen is larger and two people can play together so that the environment immediately becomes a nostalgic game room.
Philips Pediatric Coaching
Philips Experience Design, Netherlands
Philips Pediatric Coaching is a holistic coaching solution to prepare and guide children (age 4 to 8) for an MRI scan. It consists of a gamified mobile app to prepare children at home; an educational toy scanner to prepare kids in the waiting room; and guidance in the bore of the MRI scanner. All solution elements feature the same buddy characters (Ollie & friends) & design elements, as well as the same voice, so kids are consistently guided from home to scanner. The app has been co-created with clinical experts and psychologists and features educational videos, interactive games, information for parents, and an Augmented Reality-experience.
Trax: better engagement with taxes through increased agency and transparency
Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden
Tax is a give-and-take system that binds our society together as humans by providing infrastructures and services that we all rely on. However, tax touchpoints are often designed for the system rather than the user — the processes and traceability around tax, as well as how it contributes to our shared spaces and society can often feel complex, opaque, or invisible to the individual. Could we reimagine our relationship with it? And how might our connected environments offer new ways for us to interact with it?
Trax challenges us to rethink the way we interact with tax to make it more engaging, inclusive, and ultimately more democratic. Through enriching interactions with tax, citizens of different generations can become more aware of the personal benefits of shared contributions and systemic impact in their immediate environment. Over time, this can contribute to an increased sense of community and belonging with their human and non-human neighbours.
EMPOWERING
Helping people to do things they otherwise couldn’t do
End-to-end single point farmer support app for 200 million+ Indian farmers
NetBramha Studios, India
India’s 200 million+ farmers did not have access to a personalized farmer support app. Seedworks partnered with NetBramha to create a comprehensive digital platform to address farmer problems.
Seedworks App is a first-of-its-kind, single point end-to-end farmer support platform offering highly personalized farming solutions within a robustly gamified ecosystem, making tech more easily accessible to farmers.
Through Seedworks app, every farmer can avail of step-by-step farming instructions, information about crop yield, diseases, soil quality, buy seeds -everything tailored to suit the farmer’s specific needs.
Nebula — A haptic wayfinding for the visually impaired
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Traveling and exploring unfamiliar places is an exciting experience for most sighted people. However, for the visually impaired and blind people, this experience is often more frustrating and mentally demanding than enjoyable. They rely on tools informing them about their immediate surroundings and the other senses to grasp their environment. Nebula is an interactive belt that supports unfamiliar urban exploration for people with visual impairment. The belt translates navigational data into haptic sensation, allowing users to explore without constantly figuring out where they are going or from where they come.
Nebula minimizes the fear of getting lost and relieves mental strain by creating a haptic breadcrumb trail to ensure the wearer always gets home. Nebula encourages exploration while allowing the wearer to immerse in the experience and enjoy the journey.
UMA: Every Pregnant Woman’s Friend
IBM India Private Limited, India
In semi-developed and rural areas where infrastructure, lack of information, and the restrictive notion of culture adversely impact pregnancy journeys and delivery outcomes, UMA is a pregnancy service that aims to empower pregnant persons and their ancillary support system.
UMA eases the pregnancy experience by engaging different levels of stakeholders after considering their socio-demographic context, through multiple touchpoints that are accessible to them.
ENGAGING
Capturing attention, creating delight, and delivering meaning
Codeinskij
Umeå Institute of Design, Norway
This is a project that explores the realm of programming and art education for young children, trying to bring these two disciplines together in a fun and playful way. The aim is to allow children to express themselves creatively and at the same time explore and understand basic concepts of coding and programming.
The outcome is a physical modular interface that allows children to build, piece by piece, a digital and interactive art experience that they can eventually share and play with family and friends.
Earth Bits — Sensing the Planetary
Dotdotdot srl, Italy
Earth Bits is a data-driven journey to raise a collective awareness around the environmental crisis, allowing visitors of maat — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon — to experience climate change from scientific evidence. Earth Bits stimulates reflection on the relationship between science, humanity, nature, and technology in a very objective way. It shows the energetic transition and the current crisis, inviting visitors to explore the intrinsic relationship between people and the planet, understanding the repercussions of our choices and the impact of our actions.
Visitors can explore and experience knowledge with all their senses in the storytelling of four parts: four digital and interactive installations, graphics, animated videos compiled with data based on scientific evidence.
SHIFT — An alternate future for experiencing reality in digital imagery
Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden
SHIFT is an image probing tool that enables a new methodology of exploring multiple perspectives of a context. When multiple images are taken of the same context, they build a rich collection of diverse perspectives. Shift connects these images and uses any image as a visual search tool to uncover alternate perspectives from the same scene. It thus helps people to discover alternate ways of seeing the same context. It is not an attempt to challenge image manipulation technology but to use images as a means to develop a more informed understanding of the reality they represent.
EXPRESSING
Enabling self-expression and/or creativity
Color Tone — a colorfully tactile way to experience sound
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Great Britain
Color Tone is a set of tools, for people who are deaf or hard of hearing in Costa Rica, to experience the physicality of sound. It allows them to access sound and the information it contains by experiencing it through sight and touch. They can also use it with hearing people and share their experiences and feelings.
Hearing kids’ voice — Story Tree
Art Center College of Design, United States
Story Tree is a project that encourages children to express themselves and create their own stories.
Our mission is to establish an appealing storytelling experience for children and guide them to create their own stories. Through telling stories, exercise children’s imagination and expression ability, guide them to develop the habit of thinking and creating, and establish a closer family relationship through parent-child interaction.
Overall, the Stroy Tree project can bring happiness and positive influence for children to be more confident to express their own voice and practice their imagination that will give back throughout their whole lives.
Nouvelle réalité — Developing an interest in art for children through a physico-digital experience
Meaningful, France
As our world becomes more digital than ever, children are drawn to phones and tablets from an early age. The connection to the physical world and the crafts are getting lost, yet they are becoming more important than ever. Nouvelle réalité aims to recreate an interest in physical games while accepting the omnipresence of the digital. Merging the building blocks of our childhood with augmented reality allows us to create a unique experience for the child and his parents.
All of this puts Nouvelle réalité in a new artistic realm, in between digital and physical. This is a place to help children grow, and help the citizens of tomorrow on their path to building a better future.
OPTIMIZING
Making daily activities more efficient
Digital Surgery — A Research Probe
National College of Art and Design, Ireland
The use of artificial intelligence within the operating theatre will start to become more common practice in the next five to ten years. New software is being developed to act as a confirmatory ‘surgical companion’ to aid in the characterization of tissue in situ in colorectal procedures. The newly developed AI system analyses the fluorescent intensity of a dye that is injected intravenously into the patient. The system then gives a probability rating on how cancerous or healthy the tissue is.
The aim of this project was to act as an initial research probe into how human-centered design and technology could help positively impact colorectal cancer procedures.
Grin, remote orthodontist platform
NewDealDesign LLC, United States
Grin is a comprehensive digital/physical orthodontic platform that provides remote monitoring solutions to bring patients the convenience and responsible care they’ve come to expect while keeping licensed, local orthodontists at the center of their treatment.
With the Grin platform, orthodontists can overcome the current challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by strengthening existing patient relationships and reducing chair time by virtually reaching into their patients’ mouths as if they were present for an in-person appointment.
Grin keeps orthodontists and patients connected, remotely capturing developments in the mouth that may have otherwise gone unnoticed to adjust treatment plans or schedule proactive and preventative in-person visits.
Vaccine Administration Management Solution (VAM)
ServiceNow, United States
The Vaccine Administration Management Solution (VAM) provides capabilities for effective vaccine distribution, administration, and monitoring.
ServiceNow is committed to leveraging the Now Platform to help states and healthcare providers convert vaccines into vaccinations as quickly as possible. The Now Platform and Vaccine Administration Management solution have been deployed in just days by some providers, using ServiceNow’s workflow technology to rapidly improve vaccine distribution, administration, and monitoring.
Through the successful design and implementation of VAM across the globe, the ServiceNow platform has now enabled more than 20 million vaccinations and counting.
About the Awards
The Interaction Awards recognize and celebrate examples of excellence in Interaction Design across domains, channels, environments, and cultures.
