Future Voice
Interaction Awards 2014
For me, this selection was about the future, right? It’s about where I hope interaction design will go. And the promise here is always, for me, about interdisciplinarity, about telling a story, about our capacity to imagine what the world might be, not what the world is. And this selection, for me, reflects all of those things. So for me, this was recipient exemplifies some of the things that I think are really important about where we’re moving as a community.
“The 2014 Interaction Award recipients brilliantly demonstrate how the practice of Interaction Design is dedicated to the improvement of human lives,” said IxDA President Nick Gould. “These projects, and indeed all the submissions we received, are evidence of the exciting and inspiring ways in which designers can change the world for the better. In addition to recognizing the award winners’ achievement, we at the IxDA look forward to the continuing global conversation about what constitutes excellence in interaction design.”
The World Building Media Lab is honoured by IxDA Jury Chair Dr. Genevieve Bell, director of Intel Labs. In recognizing the Lab, Dr. Bell had this to say:
“For me, this selection was about the future, right? It’s about where I hope interaction design will go. And the promise here is always, for me, about interdisciplinarity, about telling a story, about our capacity to imagine what the world might be, not what the world is. And this selection, for me, reflects all of those things. So for me, this was recipient exemplifies some of the things that I think are really important about where we’re moving as a community.
They are deeply engaged with the business of telling stories. And I think telling a story well, telling a story in a way that is engaging, telling a story that uses the best of technology without being held hostage to it, those are really important things. And for me, this recipient is all about all of those things. So the Future Voice recipient here is clearly the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media division. I think the work they’re doing there is incredibly interesting and compelling, and there’s lots of aspects there that I’ve really liked.
Watching them build whole new worlds is this extraordinary thing to participate in and to watch both close up and at a distance. Right. There’s something really kind of amazing at the moment of watching people bring something into existence that has never existed before. And to have that existence, in some ways be both digital, but to be able to encounter it in the physical world. And you haven’t really lived until you’ve encountered a thousand foot virtual whale.
And I’m talking about, like, whale, right? 1000ft of whale. It’s mind boggling. And there’s something kind of extraordinary about the fact that digital technology will let us tell stories that you couldn’t actually do in the physical world, but finding a way that we can all encounter it. So it’s not a person isolated, having an experience, but there’s something kind of social and collective about engaging with these digital assets and the fact that you can put them together, recombine them, tell different stories.
That, for me, is just so extraordinarily compelling. I hope people can find this choice as inspiring as I do. I think there’s something about imagining that the future of interaction design is going to happen in lots of places, not just in interaction design programs and in design shops, but in all kinds of different places around the world. And for me, what USC is doing, what the interactive media division is doing, is about taking the best of interaction design and pushing it in this really unexpected direction. And I hope people look at it and see a new place they can go and experiment to, right?
And see something sort of really both optimistic and kind of a little challenging in that direction.
