Louw Wins IxDA Interaction Award for Engagement
News
Marti Louw, HCII faculty member and director of the Learning Media Design Center, took home the Best in Category award for "Engaging" at Interaction15, an initiative of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) that annually brings together nearly a thousand of the world's leading design professionals, educators, students and volunteers. As part of the conference, IxDA presents its Interaction Awards, which recognize and celebrate examples of excellence in interaction design across domains, channels, environments and cultures. Work is judged in six categories: connecting, engaging, empowering, expressing, disrupting and optimizing.
The Engaging award specifically recognizes a project that captures attention, creates delight and delivers meaning. Louw and a team that included Molly Johnson, a graduate student in CMU's Master of Design program, and Chris Bartley from Carnegie Mellon's CREATE Lab, earned the award for "Learning to See, Seeing to Learn: Designing for Watershed Stewardship with a Digital Insect Collection," which uses an explorable gigapixel image platform to make the process of learning to see and identify insects more visual and engaging without sacrificing scientific detail. The project's website, macroinvertebrates.org, enables a range of learners to more fully appreciate stream insects and participate in protecting freshwater resources. The project is a NSF-funded collaboration with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments. The project will be installed as a permanent exhibit at the museum’s Powdermill Nature Reserve and in the Carnegie Science Museum’s new H2OH! exhibition.
"Our goal is to create an engaging open-educational resource that fosters deep looking and learning, and encourages participation in citizen science activities by making it easier for students and volunteers to accurately identify the stream insects that are critical for monitoring water quality conditions over time," Louw said.
"What's great about this project is that it appeals and engages people from grade school through Ph.D.s It's been designed for that really broad range of users, and that's hard to do. It’s a really good example of something that in its execution has been able to square that circle," said Senior Lecturer at RMIT University Senior Lecturer Jeremy Yuille, who served on the awards' jury.
“Our aim for the annual Interaction Design Awards is to surface and share the thought leadership and innovation happening around the globe in our practice area," said IxDA President Nick Gould. "The 2015 Interaction Award recipients showcase how our practice is dedicated to the improvement of human lives.”
For more on the awards, visit http://awards.ixda.org/about/.