Read Time: 3.5 minutes
Traci Sym, founding principal at +&> (Portland, Ore.) leads a multidisciplinary jury of acclaimed professionals, which includes 2019 Best of Show winner Inguna Elere.
WASHINGTON, DC—Traci Sym, a founding principal at plus & greater than (+&>)and a member of the SEGD Board since 2019, is an award-winning experience designer and Creative Director who will serve as Jury Chair for the 2020 SEGD Global Design Awards. Sym will head a jury consisting of eight design professionals who practice in a variety of disciplines from exhibition design and wayfinding to sports branding and high-tech interactive experiences.
Since 1987, the SEGD Global Design Awards have honored Experiential Graphic Design work that connects people to place by providing direction, content and compelling user experiences in the places where they work, play, learn, travel, shop and connect. It is the most highly regarded international design competition for experiential design in the built environment.
Past winners of the SEGD Global Design Awards have ranged from media-rich interactive installations to contemplative public art, complex wayfinding systems, retail environments, museum exhibitions, branded environments, design research and architectural signage.
Sym is a graduate of the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theater and Literature before attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, UK, all of which has shaped the foundation of her design practice.
Prior to founding plus & greater than, she lead the experience design and media practice at Skylab Architecture and served as the Experience Design Director at Second Story Interactive Studios. She has directed the development of significant permanent exhibitions at major institutions in North America including the Natural History Museum at LA County and the Denver Botanic Garden.
She has designed large-scale interactive projects for various global brands and institutions and spent more than five years designing exhibitions and installations at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Today, Sym's recent work at award-winning Portland design firm plus & greater than are large-scale installation projects that include the Epicenter at OMS, the Soundstack at the Oregon Museum of Science, and Lenses on the Sky—2018 Global Design Award Finalist and 2019 Merit Award winner, outside of OMSI's newly redesigned Planetarium and many more.
Experiential Graphic Design is at its core a multi-disciplinary approach to design. The SEGD Global Design Awards, therefore, are selected by a multi-disciplinary jury chosen to represent a diversity of design disciplines, as well as clients, users, countries and students.
Past jurors have included global design leaders, among them Ken Carbone, Massimo Vignelli, Phil Freelon, Ellen Lupton, David Vanden-Eynden, Chris Calori, Lance Wyman, and many others.
The 2020 jury also represents the multidisciplinary, collaborative nature of experiential graphic design, representing architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, media development, and branding:
Traci Sym, Principal, 2020 SEGD Board Member, plus & greater than (Portland)
Darlene van Uden, Design Director, Infinite Scale (Salt Lake City)
Inguna Elere, Co-founder and Lead Designer, Design Studio H2E (Riga, Latvia) and Best of Show winner in the 2019 SEGD Global Design Awards
Joe Lawton, Managing Director, Media Objectives (Chicago)
Bosco Hernandez, Design Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco)
Cynthia Jones Parks, President and CEO, Jones Worley Design (Atlanta)
Jonathan Jackson, Partner and Designer, WSDIA | WeShouldDoItAll (Brooklyn)
Chad Hutson, Co-founder and CEO, 2020 SEGD Board Member, Leviathan (Chicago)
Nadia Tran, Graphic Designer, CORE Design Studio (Houston)
The jurors participate in an exceptionally rigorous process to select winning projects in the seven categories, which represent the core of the experiential graphic design field: Digital Experience Content, Exhibition, Interactive Experiences, Placemaking and Identity, Public Installations, Strategy/Research/Planning and Wayfinding. Part of the project evaluations are based on how well a project connects people to place, creates a memorable user experience and solves the objective or design challenge.
Past winners of the SEGD Global Design Awards have ranged from media-rich interactive installations to contemplative public art, complex wayfinding systems, retail environments, museum exhibitions, branded environments, design research and architectural signage.
The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2020, via SEGD’s online design awards entry system. Submissions will be accepted with late fees through Feb. 14, 2020.
Winners will be honored during the 2020 SEGD Conference in Portland June 11-13, 2020, and through SEGD media channels including SEGD.org, its design awards annual titled SEGD20, and supporting social media. Submission guidelines are available on SEGD.org.
To see the caliber of previous Design Award winners, take a look at SEGD’s extensive awards gallery online.
+++
Get your projects seen by expert industry professionals by entering your project(s) into the 2020 Global Design Awards today!
