Interactive Design Award launched for DIS 2004

The new DIS2004 "Interactive Design Award" will recognise the most innovative, intriguing, provocative, and delightful designs of interactive systems completed in the last two years. Organisers are now calling for entries that are 'ground-breaking', 'fun', and 'unexpected'. The criteria for the winners will include conceptual refinement, aesthetic qualities, interaction elegance, technical innovation and utility. There is no stipulation that the designs be user-centred, but we must hope that this is implicit...

DIS2004 organisers say that 'they are keen to further encourage interchange between artists and designers engaged with exploring the boundaries of interactive technologies' through the addition for the first time of an Interactive Design Award. It is hoped that in the tradition of the design arts, where the communities of designers use the winners to sense where design trends are going, the DIS2004 Interactive Design Award will provide a trend-setting event for interactive system designers: * Who is the interactive design avant-garde? * What emergent interaction sensibilities will influence mainstream interaction design and research, and inspire our material and visual culture to come?

The call stresses particular interest in entries relating to interactive performance and installation based work and site-specific interactive work, web and screen based work; interactive sound installations and performances; physical computing projects; work that explores new forms of interaction; and work that blurs boundaries between traditional design disciplines.

Interactive designs created after January 1st 2002 will be eligible. The works do not have to have been fully implemented, but should have a complete design and some form of interactive presentation of key features.

The submission deadline for entries is April 30, 2004. A panel of distinguished judges will choose winners in three categories: professional, conceptual, student; a fourth category - "best in class" - will be judged during the conference by the conference attendees. The jury process will be in two parts to allow as many participants as possible. The first part will be similar to the ACM paper reviews - where a number of reviewers simply judge the submission to be finalist. Then a selected group of judges rank and select the winners.

The winners of the contest will be asked to have an exhibit in the DIS2004 Exhibits. A presentation awards ceremony of the winners will be held at the first evening reception. The winners of the "best in show" category will be announced the morning of August 4th 2004, the final day of the DIS conference in Cambridge, MA.

Associated Link: Further details

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