Congratulations to the winnners of the regional PhizzPop Design Challenge competitions! These winners brought some serious smackdown in Round 1 and are chomping at the bit for the next design problem.
San Francisco – AKQA
New York – CreateThe Group
Chicago – Clarity Consulting
Austin – Thirteen23
Los Angeles – Cynergy Systems
Boston – Outsight Interactive
Microsoft revealed the design problem for the finale of the PhizzPop Design Challenge. Each team will be building an application to solve this problem over the next month in preparation for final delivery on March 10th at SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas.
The design problem, called “Citizenship in the 21st Century,” is a challenge to create an engagement spanning multiple platforms including Mobile, Web, Desktop, Media Center, Portable, and Kiosk that harnesses the power of social media and other Web 2.0 philosophies to help people get engaged and help them collect and evaluate information about relevant issues (be they social, political etc.). Online identity, privacy, authority of online sources, and self-regulating community are all issues that will need to be addressed by the challenge. Pulling directly from the Problem Statement: “We devote so much design energy to creating an iPod, or a BMW, why not do the same for our democracy?” Look forward to more updates on the progress of the teams and check out their bios & information at http://designchallenge.phizzpop.com/finale.aspx .
Each of these winning agency teams of 2-3 people will go onto South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, March 7 – 11. They will have approximately 90 days to complete their solutions to be showcased on Monday, March 10th in Austin.