5. Formative Assessment - Chosen Competition

The competition I've decided to work on is the IXDA - the Interaction Awards, under the category of "Connecting".
Here's a closer look at the brief and its requirements. 

The competition defines its "Connecting" to be something that is "Facilitating communication between people and communities". The competition has been running yearly since 2012. For the 2019 IxDA, the submissions were opened in July, with late submissions up to early October. Shortlisted entries will be announced in November, with the winners announced at the Interaction19 conference in February, in Seattle, USA. To be able to display the artefact at the conference, I would need to be one of the five finalists in the student Connecting category. Being shortlisted also means being able to be included in the Interaction Design Awards Yearbook of that year. 

I don't think I'll have issues with Eligibility - To qualify for the 2020 awards, I assume I'll need to prove student status between July 2017 and September 2019. The project would also need to be completed within this time frame. 

I already have a slight idea of what I want my project to be about, but I also don't want to run the risk of choosing a competition just for the sake of fitting it to my idea instead of the other way round. I'll elaborate further on my idea in the next post, but the gist of it is that I want to propose a social media which purposefully shows you things and introduces you to people that you disagree with. 

What opportunity was the project addressing?
- I suppose the opportunity to force people to be more understanding of others. I want people who see my project realise that the way they're currently engaging with social media isn't optimum, and consider alternatives.
Who were you designing for?
- I can't say everyone, but in line with my first post, I want to make sure it's accessible to a wide variety of people at the very least. Everyone would have their own social media bubbles, and this project wants to help everyone step out of theirs. 
What was the impact?
- I know I can't make a whole new social media platform as a one-woman team, but I'd like to make a good enough proposal that someone else might be inspired to collaborate with me to make it a reality. Ideally, eventually this will be rolled out as either a new social media platform, or a plugin of sorts that attaches to an existing one. 
What was the project’s design process?
- Well, working on it right now. This blog. 










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