Design Challenge(s) Fall 09 – It’s Your Turn!

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After our Summer ’09 Design Challenge, which attracted 130 submissions and spurred great discussions within the wider community, we are getting ready to launch our next round of Design Challenges.  And this time we’re back with two:

University Design Challenge Fall ’09

For this challenge we work together with students from universities and schools specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer-Interaction studies around the world to find innovative concepts to the question: “Browsing and Search History — How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?”

Students will work together in teams, with each university deploying a different solution approach — from a semester-long integration of the Design Challenge into the course to shorter Design Sprints and high-energy 24 hour Design Jams.

The program will run over a course of 10 weeks and we will report back regularly not only results but also observations from the solution process under the different settings. We will make the results and observations fully open to the wider community, using open licenses as a basis, and want to initiate a dialog between the wider community, users, professors and students.

Participating schools (as of today) are: The University of Sydney (Australia), Parsons The New School of Design (USA), PUC Minas (Brazil) and Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the University of Michigan (USA).

You’ll find more information about this challenge and the progress on our landing page.  If your school interested in joining us please drop us an email.

Design Challenge Weave Web UI

For this Design Challenge, we are looking for innovative solutions to answer the question: “Visualizing your browser data – How can we provide intuitive and useful visual representations of your browser data (such as your contacts, bookmarks, browsing and search history, tabs, stored credentials etc.) on a web page?”

Together with IxDA, a network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and Johnny Holland, an open collective, talking, sharing and finding answers about all aspects of interaction design, we invite the wider community to join us in this challenge, develop concepts and submit them to our site.  The full design brief and background information can be found here.

How It Works

The program starts in the first week of September and runs for 10 weeks. The Design Challenge is divided into two phases – each running for five weeks.

During the first phase we ask you to produce a concept, mockup and an explanation of your thinking behind it. The Mozilla Labs Weave team will provide feedback to participants at two check-in points in week three and four.

At the end of phase one the Weave team will select the most promising concepts, which will move forward into phase two. In this phase you will refine your mockup and turn it into an interactive HTML/CSS/JavaScript prototype. During phase two the Weave team will provide regular feedback, weekly check-ins and support via email/irc.

Participants are encouraged to share their ideas, approach and progress on their blogs – we will aggregate this information and provide a forum for open discussion, ideation and exchange.

At the end of phase two the Weave team will again select the most promising concepts and work with their respective creators on integrating them into Weave.

Get involved now – take the Weave Web UI Design Challenge and submit your concept here.

Important Dates for both Challenges

  • First week of September 2009 – Launch of Design Challenges
  • Last week of September 2009 – Selection of participants for phase 2 of the Weave Web UI Design Challenge
  • First week of November 2009 – Challenges end, solutions will be presented on this site; for the Weave UI challenge the team will select the most promising concepts and work with their creator on integrating them into the Weave product