Designs of the Year: Interactive

Date
12 March 2010

It should be no surprise that many of this year’s nominees tried to redefine the way we receive and experience content. After all, the publishing, music and film industries have radically changed in the span of a few years, and designers have clearly tried to respond to these changes.

The BBC iPlayer changed the way we watch TV and even listen to radio, allowing us to catch up with our favourite programmes whenever we want. In the same way, with Amazon’s Kindle we can read as many books as we like using only one hand, and download them without a computer or phone. Also, dealing with how we relate to literature is the YCN library by the" Young Creative Newtwork":http://www.ycnonline.com/ where users can borrow books in person and receive them online.

The relevance of user generated content was also evident this year. The Bloom iPhone app designed by musician Brian Eno and software designer Peter Chilvers lets you create your own music (and visualisation of it!) by simply tapping on the screen.

The Onedotzero Adventures in Motion Festival Identity by Karsten Schmidt and Wieden + Kennedy relied on its global community to self-generate an identity by aggregating posting from various social networking sites and blogs, and The Incidental, a design news online pamphlet, allowed its content to be entirely created by its main audience: designers. Created by Daniel Charny and commissioned by the British Council, this last one proved to be a great success when it first launched for the Milan Furniture Fair in April 2009.

Collaborative projects that encourage user innovation were also prominent. Zach Lieberman, Theodore Watson, Arturo Castro and the OF community were nominated for OpenFramewoks, an open-source platform which aims to make coding easy for creatives. OpenFrameworks itself was nominated along with Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), the Graffiti Research Lab, The Ebeling Group and legendary LA graffiti writer, Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE for the Eyewriter, which lets people who suffer from paralysis draw using only their eyes.

Other nominees included the online platform Pachube, developed by Usman Haque, Sam Mulube and Christopher Burman, which provides and lets users share all kinds of real time data which it obtains from sensors connected to the Internet, Evan Roth’s study of Graffiti Taxonomy in France, the L-E-D-LED-L-ED installation designed by Dilight, which lets viewers touch the hundreds of bead-shaped light emitting diodes and co-create their own work of art, and the Panda Eyes designed by Jason Bruges for the World Wildlife Fund campaign Pandamonium, which consists of 100 attention-craving pandas who will follow your every move and stare right back at you.

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