A conceptual design methodology is proposed for event-triggered based power system wide area damping controller. The event-triggering mechanism is adopted to reduce the communication burden between origin of the remote signal and the wide area damping controller (WADC) location. The remote signal is transmitted to the WADC only when an eventtriggering condition based on a predefined system output, is satisfied. The triggering condition is derived from a stability criterion, and is monitored continuously by a separate eventmonitoring unit located at the origin of the remote signal. The stability of the resulting closed loop system is guaranteed via the input-to-state stability (ISS) technique. The proposed event triggered WADC (ET-WADC) is implemented on two typical test power systems -two area four machine and IEEE 39 bus 10 machine. The validation of proposed mechanism is carried out through non-linear simulation studies on MATLAB/Simulink platform. The numerical results show the efficacy of the controller in managing the communication channel usage without compromising the stated system stability objectives.