DesignFix, Frontend.com’s societal needs programme which connects students with professional designers, has once again been recognised at the IxDA Interaction Awards. ‘Moot’, a platform concept that would enable citizens and representatives to communicate with one another directly was awarded the Best Concept and Best in Connecting Category awards at the ceremony in Lyon.
The concept was created to help communicate, and make tangible, the design principles featured in our white paper, Rules of Engagement: Design Principles for Civic Dialogue in a Post-Truth Era.
The IxDA Interaction Awards are the most prestigious ceremony for User Experience and Interaction Design in the world, so we are delighted that our work is once again being recognised at this level.
—Frank Long, Director of Frontend.com.
Long continued, “we have been unbelievably fortunate to get to work on such impactful projects through the years and the Interaction Design Association’s ongoing recognition of our work is something that all at Frontend.com are particularly proud and humbled by. Since 1998, we have always aimed to craft world-class designs while maintaining our niche size. It is a testament to the entire team at Frontend.com that we continue to fulfil that mission.”
Speaking via video at the ceremony IxDA Interaction Awards judge Dan Hon commented, “what we have seen over the last two years or more is that, for issues that people really care about, the conversations that we have online can get really nasty, really quickly. We were encouraged to see a novel use of chatbots and AI in a way to de-escalate that and try and make it a less confrontational and less argumentative issue”. He continued, “we are seeing design being applied to try and fix, not the entire problem, but to focus on just part of it; focusing on one small part at a time and still deliver genuine and effective change.”
We would like to see more projects in this vein, for projects like Moot to continue iterating. These are problems that have to be solved in the real world through a messy process of trying, failing, getting better, and trying again.
—Christina Xu, 2018 IxDA Awards Jury Chair
To see the Moot design concept and explore the design principles informing it, visit www.frontend.com/engage.