Kalender

Class begins at 13:15 !

Introduction to course, overview of schedule, tasks and marks, requirements for passing the course. Student course representatives.

Intro to design brief: Tools for digital creativity

How and in what ways will people be creative with digital technology in the future? What will the toolkits look like? How will people use them? Your task is to sketch user scenarios and main features of a tool for a selected creative domain, that you will present at the end of the course. We want you to be visionary and think beyond the current state-of-the-art, but still ground your design in what people are already doing.

This task is to be conducted during the full course (DH2629: “Interaction design as a reflective practice”), across 8 weeks, in parallel with other activities. You will also get several more specific sub-tasks related to this brief during the course.

Division into groups

We will try to form groups based on your personal interests and competence. We therefore like you to list your interests in order of preference and hand it in by the end of today’s session. There will be an upper limit of 4 persons in each team and nobody should work alone. Groups will be set during this session.

Room 4618, Lindstedtsv 5, 6th floor, D-buildning

You will have to choose if you are going to the discussion seminar at 10-12 or the one at 13-15.

Preparations/homework:

• What do you think interactive technology will be like in 10 years from now (i.e. in year 2024)?
• What will stay the same, and what will have changed?
• Do you think more or less will have changed, compared with the past 10 years ago (i.e. since 2004)?
• Will it be different or similar to e.g. science fiction? (please refer to specific books or movies if you like!)
• How would you like to affect the development, as an interaction designer?
• Bring up hopes, wishes, fears and fantasies, but try and be as realistic as you can!

 Write down your ideas as notes on a sheet of paper (max 1 page) and bring to class, for discussion in small groups.

Some links for inspiration:

Interaction Design in the year 2014 and beyond
Jonas Löwgren (2014) http://blog.mediaevolution.se/2014/01/16/interaction-design-in-the-year-2014-and-beyond/ 

A brief rant on the future of Interaction Design  
Bret Victor (2011) 
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ 

Make It So: Five Lessons in Interaction Design from Star Trek
Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel (2013)
http://uxmag.com/articles/make-it-so-five-lessons-in-interaction-design-from-star-trek

11 Design Strategies Of The Next Decade
Brian Ling (2011)
http://www.slideshare.net/designsojourn/11-design-strategies-of-the-next-decade-2878441

The future of web design: leading creatives discuss what's coming next
Neil Bennett (2013)
http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/interactive-design/whats-future-of-web-design/

The rest of the time: Meet with your project group to discuss ideas for a project

15-17: Formulate and hand in project plan, use calendar for group in kth/social

Preparations:

Based on discussions in your group, what is the current state of the art in your domain? What trends do you see? What are the most urgent current design challenges?

What are the wildest and most visionary ideas you have for a near and distant future in your domain?

Make sketches of all ideas you can come up with, about how creative tools might look like, and be used, in the future of your domain!

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Prepare a 5 minute presentation, to present in front of the class. This will be very brief overviews so everyone get an orientation of what the different groups will be working on, there will be more time to discuss

10-12: reading seminar: the shock of the old

Room 4618, Lindstedtsv 5, 6th floor, D-buildning

Preparations: read Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media (1977):
http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf 

Read the text and think out three issues or questions based on the text that you would like to discuss with your peers. It could concern aspects or terminology that you do not understand, how it misses important aspects of current design problems, or anything else. This is one of the classic texts on interaction design, that has been influential to our field in many ways. But what can you, as an interaction designer in year 2013 possibly learn from a text published in 1977?

If you have time, please take a moment also to try and find out (or remember - if you are old enough!) what the state-of-the-art in computing technology and interaction design was like in 1977.

This will be the topic for discussion during the first 45 minutes, after that we will discuss each of your project in smaller groups, based on what we learnt during the monday presentations.

Task of the week:

The historical context of your design domain.

No design happens without a historical and technical context.

What is the historical context of your domain? What traditions exist?

Look up current and past tools used in your domain.

Note: we will meet in room E33 (next door to E34) since it is free and bigger!

Present your findings through a 10 minute visual presentation, show timelines, images, and examples that you found interesting in any way. Note especially if you found something you hadnt heard of before or that you found inspirational for your proejct.

10-12 reading seminar: Interaction critizism

What is professional criticism? Why is it important to us?

Whatever you design, it will most likely be subject to some form of critique, either informally to your face, or as a written commentary in a public blog post somewhere, as ratings in the app store, or a detailed analysis by professional critics in e.g. a newspaper. As designers it can be useful to have a developed idea of how professional criticism actually work.

Reading: 

Bardzell, J. Interaction criticism: An introduction to the practice. Interacting with Computers 23, 6 (2011), 604–621.

(Download via your kth account on: http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org.focus.lib.kth.se/content/23/6/604 )

Bring a short reflection to class to support discussion. What does the author mean by interaction criticism? Why is it relevant to interaction designers? What do you find most interesting with it? Was it something you didn't like, didn't understand, or disagree with in the text?

Upload your reflection here: 
https://www.kth.se/social/course/DH2629/proxy/mod/assign/view.php?id=77  

Task for next week:

Individual, read up on reviews, and test (if possible), one digital tool within the domain you are working. Each person in the group selects a different tool. Look up research related to tools in your domain. Summarise your main findings in a written individual reflection.

As your help, note that a professional review is not just random opinions, but typically contain (according to Bardzell, 2011):

1. The work’s qualities - e.g., elements and materials, structure, content, etc. (facts)
2. The critic’s own direct sensual, emotional, and intellectual experience of with the work, including what was felt and learned as a result of it. (subjective)
3. Taking a position with regard to e.g. moral or ethical consequences of the work and possible interpretations/uses of it. (subjective)
4. Knowledge of related expert perspectives from others: what other critics, experts, and scholars have said about the work or those relevant to it in some way. (critical tradition)
5. Other known works that in some way are comparable to the work. (critical tradition)
6. An awareness of the work’s position in history and location, including how audiences, consumers, users, etc., reacted to the artifact. (critical tradition)
7. Relevant theories, be they methodological or specific to a type of work and its tradition(s). (critical tradition)

And usually focus on one of these perspectives:

- Creator. With focus on the design team, who are they? What were their intentions? How do they describe their design?

-  Artifact. With focus on the design itself, what is it? How does it look like, what can you do with it?

-  Consumer. With focus on the type of people using this product, who are they? What do they use this for, how many are they, what have they had to say about this product?

- Social context. With focus on issues such as the historical setting, class, ideology, gender, etc. What does this product say about our society at large? Design trends?

Bring your written reflection to class and discuss your findings in your project group and with the rest of the class.

10-12 reading seminar: Desiderata

Nelson & Stolderman, 2011, “Desiderata”, in The Design Way (handed out at seminar 4/2).

Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94–104.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/papers/02-weiser-computer-21st-century.pdf

What is meant by desiderata? In what ways is it important for the practice of interaction design? How do you come up with the desiderata for a particular design task?

And look through:

"We Need to Talk About TED" Benjamin H. Bratton
http://www.bratton.info/projects/talks/we-need-to-talk-about-ted/ 

Note: No need to hand in written reflections to the course web this time, but read and bring your ideas in mind to the seminar!

Preparations: try, as well as you can, based on your studies so far, to formulate the desiderata for your design project.

Prepare a 10 minute presentation for your group project

Reading seminar 10-12
Prepare by reading: Neustaedter, C. and Sengers, P. Autobiographical design - what you can learn from designing for yourself. interactions 19, 6 (2012), 28.
http://dl.acm.org.focus.lib.kth.se/citation.cfm?id=2377783.2377791 

This text from the Interactions Magazine discusses the issue of designing for and trying out ones own design oneself. Read the text and think out three issues or questions that you would like to discuss with your peers. How does the text relate to what you have read in other courses? How does it relate to e.g. your ideas about what the life as an interaction designer might consists of?

Task of the week:

This weeks task is about your personal preferences and parallel design. Start from you personal perspective on your project work, what would you find interesting, fun or valuable to do? Articulate and try to describe one concept each so that all your project member can understand what you envision. You may articulate it through sketches, a prototype, a storyboard, scenario, or a video, whatever is suitable for communicating your idea.

Show and tell

Present status of own design. What were you planning to make? What tools are you using? What did you think would be easy? What did you think would be more tricky? How far did you think you could get in just one week? And what was the result?

In the group: Summarize and synthesize, define best parts of each project. Similarities and differences. Report back to the class your main findings at the end of the class.

10-12 reading seminar
Tractinsky, Noam (2013): Visual Aesthetics. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). "The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.". Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation. Available online at http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/visual_aesthetics.html 

Read all the paper + comments and discussion underneath.

Present an overview of the latest design made by the whole group. Present as a 10 minute presentation, with focus on the main features and also aspect that you feel you need extra feedback on.

Discuss outline and content of paper to be presented at the end of the course. Requirements for the paper will be discussed in class.

The final paper should take the form of a 4 page paper following the ACM SIGCHI paper format: 
http://www.sigchi.org/publications/chipubform/sigchi-papers-word-template/view 

Presentation of finalised design

Each group brings as many copies (printouts) of their latest draft of the paper as there are members of the group. These will be read and commented by members of other groups and by the teachers. Remember that the more finished the papers are at this stage, the better feedback you will get.