OzCHI24 is an annual international student design competition run as part of the Australian HCI conference OzCHI. I got the opportunity to take part in it twice in a row 2013 and 2013. In 2013, our team was selected as one of the four finalists. We presented our work in OzCHI '13 as second round of challenge and came third worldwide.
OzCHI 2013
Duration :- 21 Sept, 5:30 a.m. to 22 Sept, 5:30 a.m. (IST)
Other Team Members :- Abhinav, Mannu, Mehul, Minal
Problems statement for OzCHI24 2013 was to design the 'Future of Email'. Email has changed from its original vision of a simple asynchronous communication system
to a core application for digital personal information management. In its
current form, Email lets you glance at all of your information at once. Mechanisms introduced into Gmail (Google’s
email client) such as starring, labeling, sorting into folders, importance markers
were initially proposed as a means to classify and de-clutter the mailboxes.
But in contrast they have overloaded the mailbox with information. We propose a
solution based on tagging, threads and visualization techniques to make the
email system much more organized and effective. We mainly focus on threads and
our understanding of the life-cycle of communication to arrive at the solution.
Through our study we found out the present email usage patterns across a varied set of users. We found the problem of cluttered mailbox common amongst all. With the application of our simple concept of threading and clustering by tagging, we have been able to overcome the shortcomings of the current email client. It is a radical change in its structure and is a major step in carving out the probable future of email.
Out of 45 teams, we got selected as one of the four finalists and we presented our work in OzCHI '13 as second round of challenge. Our detailed solution and methodology can be viewed in the blog we made for this competition. A research paper of our work titled 'Threading Centric Approach Towards Email Client' was published in the proceedings of OzCHI 2013.
OzCHI 2012
Duration :- 22 Sept, 5:30 a.m. to 23 Sept, 5:30 a.m. (IST)
Other Team Members :- Abhinav, Siddant, Mehul, Abhishek
A student design challenge was held preceding OzCHI 2012 conference, where teams from around the world had a 24-hour time period to develop a solution to a given HCI research problem. The problem statement was to "design a system that takes advantages of cloud computing, mobile devices and fast mobile networks to enhance the experience of our daily-life collaboration." Complete details about the challenge can be viewed from here.
Blog
All the participating teams were told to keep updating about the design process they were following through a blog as online journal and final note along with a concept video to be given finally. You can look at the design process followed and solution proposed by us in our blog. 
