Alice Wins the Interaction Awards 2016 for Expressing
Urban Informatics Doctoral Candidate Alice Brown, with her colleagues Joshua Wilkinson (Hons) and Revy Hamilton (Hons), have received global recognition for their project titled SquareTalk, a project developed during their honours studies at QUT.
The IxDAwards are an initiative by the Interaction Design Association, who have a global network of over 80,000 members dedicated to professional interaction design practices. The students recently accepted their award at the IxD16 conference in Helsinki, Finland.
SquareTalk explores ways tacit technologies can foster social connectedness between strangers are largescale festival events. It was first exhibited in 2014 at the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria. The project invites people to design their own lanters in participatory workshops . After illustrating personal stories around the topic of “change” on their lanterns, the participants are given the opportunity to record a short reflective audio piece. The lanterns are then installed in a darkened room, where other people use a “torch” to bring each lantern to life by touching each lantern with it, illuminating its illustrations and echoing its creator’s reflections throughout the space.
Alice was delighted to hear Brenda Laurel describing SquareTalk as “It’s up there in the sublime for me.” Alice’s PhD builds on this to explore designing for care around posttraumatic growth with Dr. Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and A.Prof Jane Shakespeare-Finch as supervisors.
More information about SquareTalk can be found at www.sqtproject.com.