IxDA Student Design Challenge
From student to professional to co-chair, one designer’s journey towards giving back to IxDA
Co-chairing 2018’s Student Design Challenge are Ahmed Riaz and Ana Domb. Ahmed (or Riaz, as he’s known to colleagues) reflects on how the IxDA student competition changed the trajectory of his career.
David Betz: You won the first IxDA Student Design Challenge. What was that like?
AHMED RIAZ: My experience was really interesting. I really wanted to work in the UX industry, and I wasn’t feeling especially challenged in my current role. My vision was to get into a place like Frog or IDEO or one of the bigger consultancies. Incidentally, I had applied to both—and been rejected.
In the meantime I got into the DMBA program at CCA where in a studio class, we did a project that we were really proud of. At that time the interaction design industry didn’t really have any awards, and if you were an interaction designer, you wouldn’t know if you were good or bad or just meh. There was no way to compare at the time because the discipline was just developing. So when we saw this student award we were inspired to submit our project. Lo and behold, we got selected as finalists!
How did that change things for you?
RIAZ: I ended up representing our team (since we could only send one person.) Then there was the Charrette, the competition that happens at the Student Design Challenge. We had 3 days to come up with a design. While we were working on all of that, people from the companies where I had been rejected — Frog and other big consultancies — started reaching out to me because they knew I was a finalist. I tried to push the interviews and the meetings to after the Charrette, because of the intense effort it required. I scheduled all the inquiries for right after I had presented.
I bet really heavily on this one presentation, and if I bombed, I would probably not have gotten any job offers or had anyone think much of me. Instead, what happened is I did really well!
Winning the competition really changed things for me. I went from a big “trying to break through” moment to betting heavily on myself and really having it pay off.
And that resulted in your first job?
Yes. I had an offer from Frog along with a few others, but I decided on Frog because I knew a lot of people that worked there from my undergraduate days, the Industrial Design Program at Savannah College of Art and Design. This job was at Frog in Austin, where I knew a lot of the crew.
As with any “dream job” I was totally immersed. I would follow IxDA through videos and chats with people I knew. In between real projects and chats with colleagues, I became intrigued about creating a talk on “play.” Really, the only place for me to share that inspiration was IxDA, so that’s how rejoined the community.
Is that you came around to co-chair this year’s Student Design Challenge?
Yes. I went to Helsinki to speak on the subject of how play, game design, and interaction design have all had a rocky relationship with the term “gamification.” People have picked perhaps the poorest parts of gaming to include in interaction design, and I wanted talk about how we could have a better relationship with gaming and be inspired by really amazing game mechanics.
When I did that I met with Dave Malouf again, who was the guy who had organized much of IxDA, and especially the Student Design Challenge when I was a participant. Dave just asked me if I was interested — and thought I would be a good person for it. I saw it as an opportunity to give back and to help students just starting their careers.
How are you evolving the IxDA Student Competition as co-chair?
I’ve been co-chairing it with Ana Domb for two years.
We’ve been thinking about this as a platform—in terms of inclusion, diversity, and global perspective. One of the things we’ve been working on is making sure more people can apply to the challenge — that creates more opportunities for them to be at the conference—which is the real prize.
Beyond being “the winner,” being invited to the conference is a unique opportunity to meet all of these amazing people. The first year, we tried to make sure that we expanded who could apply.
We had a more diverse set of people applying, so the next thing we tried to do was make more connections between attending students and leaders in the design community. We created a small group of people that would mentor students at the conference which would hopefully foster relationships they wouldn’t have otherwise.
Another change we made last year (and we hope to do this year) echoes the first aim of getting more students to experience the conference. Sometimes at events like this, students are away from the conference; they’re at a school or facility nearby. Instead, we put the students’ project room inside the conference venue so that attendees can walk around and see them in action. It makes the whole thing more intense, dramatic, and fun.
How did you select this year’s challenge around education?
When we thought about this year’s topic, we felt it needed to not be connected to the conference city, but more connected to the needs of the world. That’s how we came to the U.N. Charter and their sustainable development goals, because it has that global nature that we’re trying to bring in (with the students, the mentors, and the challenge). The education theme also resonated with our sponsor, Microsoft Design.
Providing an “Inclusive, equitable, and quality education” is an important part of Microsoft’s commitment to empowering learners around the world.
— Margaret Price, Principal Design Manager, Microsoft
So, this is more of a platform to enhance someone’s ability to connect, and less picking exactly who is the “best student.”
Final questions: If I’m a student, why should I be interested in this? Why should I enter?
Well, equitable education is a complex issue that deserves your best design thinking. Also, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel to Lyon, France and meet the most amazing minds in User Experience and Interaction Design. You will have a chance to interact with these leaders personally, to show your work (that you create in Lyon) to them, as well as to an audience of thousands of design professionals. If you want a platform for that, this is your chance.
Apply from the link below. Our paths just might cross in Lyon!
IxDA Student Design Challenge 2018
Sponsored by Microsoft Design
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Riaz is a professional napkin sketcher and Head of UX Strategy at Logitech. Follow him twitter
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