Congrats to the five winners of the first phase of the IxD13 Student Design Challenge who will be joining us in Toronto in January! Special thanks to our wonderful slate of judges who helped us get to this point.

James McIntyre, Malmo Hogskola
https://youtu.be/Dzf90LGC59c

Mani Hariharan, National Institute of Design, India

Ari Zilnik, Carnegie Mellon University

Yongsoon Choi, Graduate School of Media Design in Keio University, Japan
video offline

Bethany Stolle, Austin Center for Design

We’ve got video of the four finalists giving their presentations. You can see their slide decks here.

Grand Prize: Priscilla Mok

1st Runner Up: Diksha Grover

2nd Runner-Up: Siri Johansson

Honourable Mention: Jaime Krakowiak

Sometimes I get a good feeling… that it’s gonna be a great week here at Portigal.

Here’s what we are looking forward to…

• After bidding a fond farewell to Etta James last week, this week we will lovingly remember two completed projects with a team debrief + reflection.
• Tamara and Julie are preparing for fieldwork next week in LA (woot! woot!). Let us know if there is anything particularly fantastic we should try to squeeze in, though we will of course be pretty darn busy.
• Steve is in the final week of preparation for Interaction 12 in Dublin (another woot! woot!) and getting everything in order for the Student Design Challenge.
• Steve is writing his book about the Art and Craft of User Research Interviewing and Tamara will be interviewing him about writing. Stay tuned for highlights…
• Steve continues some interviews for the Omni project. Did you see the recent interview with Molly Wright Steenson?
• Julie and Tamara will be out and about learning from fellow practitioners this week at a number of sweet gigs around the city including SF Service Design Drinks at Adaptive Path, Creative Mornings at Typekit, and theWhiteboard at SonicRim. Will you be at any of these? If so, please do say “Hi!” We would so love to meet you!
• Julie is nose deep in details and planning for some fieldwork for the Omni project. More to come on this.
• Steve is exploring an exciting project opportunity in partnership with another studio. Viva collaboration!
• Tamara is ready for a creative fuel injection when she chaperones her son’s school field trip to the Children’s Creativity Museum tomorrow. Fun for all ages!

Hope to see you out and about.

Whew! Our wonderful judges have sifted through the 56 entries! We heard from a number of judges how impressed they were overall with the quality of the entries and the creativity and passion that the group overall had to offer. Of course, this makes the selection process a difficult one. We’ve thought to ourselves “Well, what if we could take them ALL!!!” but of course, we can’t.
We managed to find four wonderful and inspiring entries among all the bounty of goodness we received from around the world. Our winners are (in no particular order)

• Diksha Grover – National Institute of Design, India
• Siri Johansson – Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden
• Jaime Krakowiak – Austin Center for Design, USA
• Priscilla Mok – Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Here are each of their videos

Siri

Jaime