Congratulations to the second-year graduate students in the Division of Design whose project was announced as the winner of this year’s Design Ignites Change IDEA Award on 08 February 2013. Known as Pivot, the project was created as a way to discretely empower victims of human trafficking. The design team included Mike Fretto, Kari Gaynor, Josh Nelson, Adriel Rollins, and Melanie Wang; they worked under the guidance of Assistant Professor Tad Hirsch.
The Pivot Project is featured in the April 2013 issue of Arts & Sciences Perspectives. There was also a feature article about the project in The Daily on 23 May 2013. On 15 July 2013, Melanie Wang was interviewed on KOMO News about the Pivot Project.
A second congratulations goes to this group of designers who all graduated in June 2013. The Pivot Project received Gold in the 2013 IDEA Awards in July 2013. See the full 2013 Gold Gallery and the Pivot Project’s description on the IDSA website for more information.
On 23 July 2013, the Pivot designers launched an indigogo campaign to raise funds for production. They raised just over $3,500 by the end of the campaign on 06 September 2013. An article appeared in UW Today on the day before the campaign ended.
A third award for Pivot was announced on 08 February 2014 during the Interaction Design Association conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Pivot won the Interaction Award in the Empowerment Category. You may read about the project on this Interaction Awards webpage.