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Today, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) announced the launch of the IxDA Interaction Awards, a first-of-its-kind awards program dedicated to celebrating global excellence in the discipline of interaction design.

In the past few weeks, there’s been a lot of talk, bashing, passionate rants, etc. about design awards and competitions. IxDA has been observing this tumult from the sidelines, anxious to join the conversation with a tangible, open, and inclusive proposal grounded in the IxDA volunteer-led organizational philosophy.

The Interaction Awards program is a community initiative spearheaded and powered by volunteers dedicated to interaction design. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with my co-chair Jennifer Bove and a group of fantastic advisors – Marc Rettig, Mark Breitenberg, and Steve Baty – to create this awards program that recognizes and promotes outstanding work in interaction design.

The Interaction Awards ’12 will open for submission in the Spring 2011, and will be awarded at the Interaction 12 Conference in Dublin, Ireland, in February 2012. We will select 10 outstanding works completed in the last two years from across domains, platforms, environments, and cultures, that embody and improve meaningful relationships between people and the products and services they use. Entries will be judged by an expert jury comprised of practitioners, academics, business leaders, and elected community members. The jury chair and members will be announced early next year.

You can participate in the conversation on IxDA.org.