About
A Senior Studio In Interaction Design
In this senior studio you will look beyond the edges of the object to the spaces, contexts and content that shape the things we experience. This studio is about the seamless integration of space and technology/interaction design. How to do that. How to bring that to industry. How to break down the wall between interaction design and the traditional architectural disciplines. A building is a system, an environment, one that is made alive by use and inhabitation. Sensitivity to the invisible yet powerful force of pace is also what this studio is about.
You will begin this course by carefully studying the contemporary and historical situation of three design disciplines and the forms that are being produced in each (teams of two). You will then in three small projects be asked to integrate all three each project out (teams of four). One of your three, at least, MUST be designed to allow/anticipate a final term-ending functioning prototype that may have a short lifespan but must live long enough to be video-taped for posterity. This prototype will be programmed in either Max MSP or Arduino and can incorporate aspects in Flash. You can pick which one of the three you wish to prototype and show. Yes, this is a senior studio. You are now asked to show EVERYTHING that you have learned in this program to date and put it all together. This is a CAPSTONE course: a grad project if you will, but in three small courses of the same meal, or a 3 act play, or a symphony or operetta. Pick your metaphor.
“The idea of dealing separately with architecture and technology is no longer appropriate or practical”, states Fred Dust of IDEO in the seminal book EXTRA SPATIAL. You will act as IDEO does, and as you have been exposed to their methods (and if you haven’t: better get reading, starting with “the Art of Innovation”). Why IDEO? Well, you need to take into industry “stuff that works”, not just theory. IDEO teams have specialists who span the areas you have been exposed to here in the past 3-4 years: graphic designers, cultural anthropologists, technology specialists, architects, industrial designers - collaborative teams with the express purpose of producing INNOVATION.
These teams are able to design complete systems. But most importantly, as a delimiter of scope, your “complete systems” will be responsive and receptive to space and to users in that space, that context. EXTRA SPATIAL begins by asking, “what is the relationship between technology, people and three-dimensional space?”.
IDEO was one of the first to begin to realize this new design medium, most notably with the Prada epicenter store in New York. It was a case–study in the emergent field, and was conceived by the dream team of IDEO + Rem Koolhaas. I first met Fred Dust short after the store was complete. He was by then however, already presenting publicly what DID NOT work, while the majority of critics were still gushing.
Integrating technology into a space will not just make it better in of itself. On the contrary. “Smart” is usually just the opposite. Sometimes the good old “product/object” will actually do it better. Partly this is because this is new, we are all watching to see where it goes. Some technologies are proprietary and software is not evolving (re: cellular phones). Often Interaction design is just too serious, too constrained to be meaningful. Brenda Laurel recently said, I think one of the reasons why games have led the way in interaction design in some respects is because the objective is to have fun. There’s not a productive outcome, so all the seriousness that we bring to work is not present in the design of these things”.
Anyway, I could go on. That should get us started, there’s the course thesis. I have developed this over six years in my old IAT 393 course. This is new material, new projects, but after a lot of the same goals.
