jennblog

Celebrating the Interaction Awards

Over the past 18 months I’ve been moonlighting on Kicker.

My co-conspirator Raphael Grignani and I, with the help of several volunteers, designed, built and launched the Interaction Awards, as a way to recognize and celebrate the great work in our field.

IxDA’s Interaction Awards celebrated their first award winners in a swanky ceremony at the Lord Mayor’s House in Dublin, Ireland. As part of the Interaction12 conference, over 500 people attended the event to applaud 26 inaugural winners, experience the winning projects, and acknowledge the first portfolio of interaction design excellence recognized by the Interaction Design Association.

The Venue:

Raphael and I take the stage:

To mark the occasion, we produced a series of short films about interaction design, our deliberation process, and the winning work, directed by Christian Svanes Kolding, and filmed during the Interaction Awards’ Jury weekend in NYC last November.

Here are a few of the films!

On defining interaction design:

On our inaugural jury:

On our deliberation process:

On what interaction design aspires to:

See more videos profiling the top award winners, and photos from the Awards Ceremony, and see all of the winning projects on the Interaction Awards Winners site. read juror Helen Walter’s wrap up of the awards on Fast Company.

Recent

Sunset, Venice beach, a photo by JLB on Flickr.

Puppy, a photo by JLB on Flickr.

Peekaboo, a photo by JLB on Flickr.

Sunday Morning

Yay Nieces!

I have to interrupt my (recently) regularly-scheduled programming for two reasons: 1- my chiropractor insisted I take 10 days off from crossfit, and 2 – I have nieces!

Welcome to the world to our little turtle and bird, Abigail and Emily Donegan. So happy to finally meet you both!

Sunset at halfmoon bay

Sunset on Mt Tam. 8.31.11

There’s one just like this nearly every day.

Like the Cavemen Did

In October I joined United Barbell, a new crossfit gym in SOMA that’s conveniently located in the same building as Kicker Studio. It’s run by two awesome women named Jenny & Olivia, and the people there genuinely rock. Shortly after I started they began a 30-day Paleo challenge, designed to get their athletes into the habit of eating like cavemen did: eliminating all grains, dairy, sugar and processed food in favor of lean meats, vegetables, eggs, seeds and nuts. Seemed like an impossibly strict regimen, but I always do better with elimination than moderation so I took the challenge, along with a dozen or so other gym members.

As advertised, eating Paleo wasn’t really as hard as it sounded. Apart from missing alcohol and occasional chocolate I managed to get used to a life of omelets, salads, and almonds and found myself cooking at home much more frequently, which was a necessary benefit of eating next to nothing commercially prepared. While it got monotonous in the middle and pretty tiresome by the end, I managed to go 30 days without cheating from the Paleo regime, and low and behold won the UB Challenge!

Six weeks later I’m still living like a caveman, apart from enjoying a meal a week that includes my long-lost carbs. If all goes well I’ll keep this up through the holidays and cement it as a general way of living in the new year. Turns out it’s not impossible, and nearly easy with enough planning. Proves that 30 days of anything can create a habit. I wonder how many more days it’ll take to turn into a lifestyle?

ben’s bar

my new neighbor

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by JLB.

Tapped with one finger on an iPhone. Please forgive any typos.

Bay to Breakers

Or, yet another reason for San Franciscans to don costumes.

Yesterday, Ben, Erika and I ran in San Francisco’s 98th annual Bay to Breakers race. B2B is a 12K (7.5 mile) run from the San Francisco Bay to Ocean Beach. It’s known for being a party disguised as a race.

Highlights include crazy costumes, a tortilla toss, a school of salmon who wear fish hats and run upstream from finish to start, centipede groups of 13 who compete in a connected line, giant floats lots and lots of naked runners. It’s unlike any other race I’ve ever done, and I’ve only seen the costumes that passed me on their way to the start.

I tried to get back to a suitable spectating location once I finished the race, but the roads were so packed (80,000 runners + crowds) that I couldn’t get close. Next year I’ll run in costume, I swear.

Erika brought flowers for Ben and I to carry since
we were under dressed (as runners).

Erika, on the other hand, was well dressed in her
Burning Man BumbleBee dress.

Token naked guy photo, because, well… there
are a lot of them. And they all carry bags.

There were a lot of Elvii at the race – this one
finished up just in front of me.