./emilychang news

Ideacodes co-founder Emily Chang has been nominated for the prestigious Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards 2009 program for excellence in Interaction Design. This is the first year that they will be giving an award in Interaction Design.  The National Design Awards were conceived by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum ten years ago to honor the best in American design. “First launched at the White House Millennium Council in 2000, the annual Awards program celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement. To qualify for the awards, you must be nominated by one or more members of a distinguished nominating committee, comprised of more than 2500 leading American architects, designers, educators, journalists, authors, filmmakers and other professionals representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia.” You can learn more at last year’s 2008 National Design Awards site.

Ideacodes contributed to the 2008 site-wide redesign of ideo.com as interaction designers and consultants.  Bringing added perspective to the in-house team, Ideacodes collaborated with core members on navigation and functionality to create “delightful modes of interaction and content presentation.”

Ideacodes worked on the design and implementation of the public website for Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom, which launched today.  The Social Media Classroom platform itself, developed by Sam Rose, includes a free and open-source web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes - integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting are the first set of tools.  The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.  Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and there’s a hosted version of the Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.

Emily Chang, designer and co-founder of Ideacodes, has been included in NowPublic’s 50 Most Influential Individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. “The Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of who’s voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channels - Twitter, Facebook, Flick, YouTube and the like - transform how media is created and spread.”

Ideacodes co-founder, Emily Chang, has been invited to be on the jury for TWS2008 (the.colis Web Startup), Israel’s office dot com competition, presenting the most promising Israeli web startups of the year. A “well known and respected jury will choose 10 of the most exciting Israeli start ups for a chance to present their venture to more than 500 international and Israeli high tech industry members, private investors and VCs.”

Ideacodes is delighted to be working as a design partner for Adaptive Path, a leading user experience firm in San Francisco.

Ideacodes is pleased to be working with Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, the company behind WordPress, Akismet, bbPress and other fine web services.

Emily Chang was quoted in an article titled ”Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?”, in which Noam Cohen compares the websites of the two candidates.

Thanks to MashupAwards for awarding Twitterverse the mashup of the day. Twitterverse is an Ideacodes Labs project which and provides a visualization of the most commonly used words in a given time period from the Twitter public timeline.  MashupAwards is a hand-picked showcase of the best web mashups based on uniqueness, creativity, utility, content and user experience. 

Ideacodes is delighted to work with Howard Rheingold on his new video blog, vlog.rheingold.com. In Howard’s words: “It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text.” Howard Rheingold is “one of the world’s most foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. He was the first Executive Editor of HotWired, an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the founders of Electric Minds. He’s also credited with inventing the term “virtual community” and the author of Smart Mobs, “widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era.” We greatly enjoyed implementing Howard’s unique design into a video blog.