About IAT 338: Interactive Objects + Environments 07

This course should be understood as being in a continuum in the Interaction Design studies concentration of SIAT that builds on the second year course, DDE, Design For Digital Environments (Taylor), and works in tandem with the concurrent course Information Design (Wakkary). It is not recommended that a student take this course without having first having completed IAT 230 and taking both simultaneously will be discouraged and in fact requires instructor approval for pre-requisites. Before we begin to talk about the specifics of this schedule and course, let’s stop and at the overview–level think about what we learned in the previous course.

DDE first and foremost opened up the notion that visual form has (underlying) structure that organizes it. Structure is not style. Suddenly the design student realizes that they can “learn” to design as if learning to speak in a foreign-tongue. This is a key moment. Most design schools have the student learn design as “style”, not as language and so there are few “rules” that govern its success and that can be practiced in any orderly way. It is practiced as craft. This is archaic. Given the changes in the design world brought about by computing, it is also anachronistic.

Without learning and then being able to see and understand this structure and how it works, you only see the surface of things and not how they actually work. Each new work is a blank page. Learning “structure” allows the designer to evaluate the effectiveness of what they create and to explain their decisions to others. These structures can then be understood as adhering to essentially “grammatical” rules and principles. The form-maker then can begin to master the “language” and its principles necessary to communicate the formal idea. A method can be employed to learn the language that goes beyond intuitive decisions and personal tastes: in other words, it is not relativistic. Further, once this language can be mastered, the use of such a method implies that ANY design language can be learned using similar method, and learned much more rapidly with the practice.

So, understanding that language governs form was the primary purpose of the course.

The second, but equally as important purpose (if not more so) of DDE was to get the students using and becoming familiar with the design process.

This process is expressly a problem-based exercise. Better processes create better design. The quality of any process will directly determine the final result. In fact design may be more about the process ultimately than the form and it is certainly here that its greatest value as a strategic tool lies. For designers to move beyond a role and perception as solely “form-givers”, they are advised to become master processers. Our graduates should aspire to “design management”, not technical design production. It is the mastery of quality, diverse, creative, thoughtful processes that will create this new opportunity for design graduates.

The third purpose of DDE was to get the learner used to a tripartite formation of design as opposed to an individual vision. Design is always a shared concept that is formed by three parties: the designer, the audience and the client, and all three play important and valuable roles. Better designs - and better strategic decisions- are created when all three are included from the start of any process. Getting design school grads to move this paradigmatic idea into industry will be a key step in the evolution of design. Bottom-up processes are better and richer in the long term.

The fourth outcome of DDE is to become capable with the communication of complex ideas in form. But, again, the that communication is a structural issue, and all form is governed by STRUCTURE that can be understood and revealed.

Which brings us to this course. What is this course about?

This course has a similar premise, a simple one but equally as nuanced. The premise of I+R is that ALL CULTURE IS STRUCTURED as well, not just the form that operates in it. Once we can see the multiple and layered structures in culture, and we can see how form works in context then we can begin to design for those contexts.

Designing for context, then, is the next big idea shift that a young designer must make, and which we will focus on now. Once they do so, they begin to become a strategic design thinker and move evermore away from the old role as form-giver. So, what we are after in this course is to understand the structuring of culture itself and how contextual design works.

The second purpose of this course is simply to move your ability as design processes to much higher and sophisticated level.

All the while, a contextual issue for us will be informative; beginning to empower your understanding of the field you are studying, what its futures are and where it has come from. Design is in flux at present. Interaction design is in massive flux. So where is the work when you leave this program? What can you do now to manage this oncoming reality? As always, ignorance is NOT bliss. You are now exactly half way through your studies. The second half starts ticking now. Are you prepared? We need to start you thinking NOW about these issues. And we will engage these questions along the way.

The Third and ultimate purpose of this course is to study INNOVATION and begin to learn ways to push our work to produce innovation and to seek it at all times. Innovation is one of those words that is over-used and badly understood. Much like the word “design” itself. By the end of the course we will put the two together: a TRUE understanding of DESIGN and a TRUE understanding of INNOVATION. The ultimate aim is for you to leave capable of DESIGNING FOR INNOVATION.

That’s it: moving you to contextual design and getting better and better at processing design, and learning to design for innovation. That’s all we are doing this term.

This course will be hard work, but I guarantee that it will pay off and that you will begin seeing the world completely differently as a result of taking it.

Be very clear: this course WILL challenge you. We read a lot and some tough theory. The readings we do will provide a gateway for your movement toward “contextual design” thinking. Design does not occur in a vaccum. So what “contexts” affect a message or indeed its ultimate impact in the world?

This content is what will shift your thinking and so it MUST be read. We must remind ourselves again to “get the education and not just the degree”. We also need to remember to think of what we are doing as a “flow” activity: therefore we can EXPECT some anxiety. Manage it.

But you are most likely not unlike other students I’ve had or even myself: you won’t WANT to read this stuff. It is admittedly long, hard, sometimes-boring and even dry and academic at times. Who has time to read when we’re all so busy? 		Why do we need to? How can we ensure that this material sinks in? How can we structure and scaffold that learning? If it is valuable, it must be assessed.

We need new content now, new ideas to play with, to get you thinking, to stretch you, to play with. It’s new ides that create innovative directions. In the final three projects in this course we need you to investigate a new way of doing something. Really new. New for you and new for your society. We need to be up-to-date and stay there. Design LIVES there. In that innovative space. We have to find it and have you be able to find your way back to it. And as a class we ALL have to understand the shifts and be able to engage a shared discourse (open discussion).

If everyone doesn’t share this new knowledge, we can’t move forward and it’s not good enough to have the few who will read it anyway. We need critical mass. We need everyone PUSHING everyone else. We need to foster and develop and value and cherish our culture of excellence.

To help you get through this stuff then we will do an examination of sorts after everything we read: first, to make sure that everyone DOES read it, and second; to make sure that it is USABLE information for each of you, that it is clear and organized in your mind. In the past in fact I did use “quizzes” to test this knowledge. But luckily for you, I no longer do that because I have found a more effective way of testing it.

After every reading you do, in a small team you will develop a visual information model to show me that you read it, understand it and most importantly can USE IT. That’s why we are reading at the front end of the course: to apply it in the two assignments at the end. These models should almost begin to resemble math equations or “machines” that can be applied to any design problem. For example: if we do x, then y and divide it by z we get: what? I’ll show you examples from last year. Remember this.

However learning to “information model” is also, in of itself a really valuable design tool and strategic asset for the design manager. Models take un-useful “data” and turn this into useful “information”, or even “knowledge” or better yet, “wisdom”. And using what we know of “communication” from last year, they will develop your ability to succinctly communicate and organize complex ideas to others (maybe even other speaking very different languages: say business, IT and Design).

We will begin with static 2d graphic information models and then learn some motion and start doing BOTH every time out looking for the best way to capture concepts effectively so that you can APPLY them.

As a side benefit, we will continue to work on your visual design capabilities in these applied reporting projects. We also further develop in these models and in the successive projects your abilities with motion graphics as a complex form of communication and narrative.

So, the course is in two parts: learning to model and reading a ton of new stuff to move you forward in part one and then; giving you three fairly complex problems to solve using these new tools and ideas. At term’s end, you will:
a.leave the course with a more developed way of structuring your design proposals and
b.this should allow you to approach any course here or any project with a mature method that ensures success no matter the scope, and …context.

Third year is a challenge. It is that next step educationally. The bar goes up again. What got you here is now assumed to be the foundational knowledge that you bring to the next set of even more difficult challenges.

Understand that, expect it, manage it. In third year, you either break through to the next level of thinking or you go into your graduating year unprepared and even unaware “that you don’t even know that you don’t know”. You are just blissfully unaware. I challenge you, as a class, a cohort to not leave here unprepared. I’ve seen both in recent years here.

The objective for me, for you, at this point is to make sure that you are prepared to engage the 4th year Senior Level project courses with a concepts that are rich, innovative and worth doing. It’s time now to start getting focused and sponging the terrain for what you need to know to succeed in your chosen direction. You need to start getting clear about that direction now and over the next four months. Get clear. It’s time.

In this regard, I liken my role to a gatekeeper: nobody, NOBODY will get through me, through this net if they are still jacking around like they may have in Tech One. Be serious or don’t take the course at this time. Choose one. Be on warning: I will not pass those not up to this challenge and 4th year.

Thus, expect that I am going to PUSH YOU as I will everyone else in this class, to do your best. And, Remember: it’s never personal. EXPECT that I am going to expect excellence at all times. I ask you to, and I hope that you can each maturely make this distinction.

When I see my third year’s on first day of classes, there is something in their eyes that tells me that they have matured from what I see in the fresh faces in Second year in DDE. It’s hard to see it developing during DDE, but by the next fall, there it is.

Then when I meet my fourth year’s there is a level again that I can see. My Italy grads, more so. Let’s expect growth from each other.

My job is to move you through this continuum. Many have gone through this before you. This course is now in its 5th year running.

You will just have to trust me at a certain level. I promise in return to do my very best for you.

An undergraduate’s journey goes from the concept of “I”, of self, when they come in, and moves to the concept of “we”, when they leave, of community and society and their place and role in it. I ask you to become a community here, now: of fellows and colleagues. Support each other and each other’s excellence, dreams and growth.

This has been the point of University education back to the Middle Ages. You are in the process of this transformation right now. Have this perspective and cultivate this year, the maturity to know. Now we become leaders. It’s great to have you back. I’m really looking forward to working with each of you again. So let’s make the most of our time together and I look forward to seeing the kind of work that so impressed me at times last year.

Goal this year: everyone in this class operating at a pre-professional level. Show leadership. Be leaders.

Course Texts:
1 Post Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker
2 Boom, Bust + Echo, John Foot (handout provided)

Download course outline