What's it all about?

Content

The course consiste of four elements: lectures (not mandatory), literature sessions (mandatory, not graded), exercises (semi-mandatory, not graded per se) and a portfolio (final project, graded). For different topics, see the schedule.

Exercises

This course is designed for active participation, discussion and a lively exchange of opinions and knowledge. To encourage such a creative working environment, you are required to carry the exercises out at school, working together with your peers and teachers, asking for and giving advice and opinions on each other's work. Some of the exercises are carried out in pairs or groups, others you will carry out alone.

There are seven exercise-sessions. In some cases there are two exercises per session – in that case choose the one you find most interesting!

• (mandatory) Expressions of Interaction -- to study how interaction per se expresses itself, and to work with emotions.
• (doing one is mandatory) The Schizophrenic iPod – to explore how various aspects of interaction can affect design, or
• InterActivaThing – to analyze and re-apply a given aesthetics of interaction.
• d6 – to work with designing for playfulness and to see how one minor change can alter gameplay entirely, or
  The Sens(ible) Calculator – to work with sensing, i.e. engaging the whole body and the mind in interaction
• The New Office Assistant -- to work with "personality" as a means to create coherency.
• iSpy – to explore how one can use design as a tool for criticism, or
  Designing Emotions - on how to design interactions, expressions and form when aiming for a specific emotion, in this case angst.
• Temporal Themes – to work with time as a design material.
• (mandatory) Face...what??? – to work with different aesthetic ideals, combining them.

Three exercise-sessions are mandatory; The first, second and last ones. As for the second session, you of course only choose one of the exercises in it. In addition you participate in two of the remaining four exercise-sessions (they are thus-semi-mandatory).

Exercises 4 and 6 are shorter exercises carried out in class and feedbacked in a general discussion. Exercise 1 is feedbacked via a guessing contest(!). As for the others, they are feedbacked twice. Firstly, a mid-crit-session is scheduled 13.00-13.40 these days. Here, you meet in smaller groups (4-5) and describe how far you’ve come and what issues you have run into; basically these sessions are about seeking and giving advice. In addition you will give feedback on your final design during a short discussion with one of the two teachers, typically the week after.

Literature

There are four literature-sessions in the course. To the right you can download the list of literature questions for this course, and you can also download the papers themselves. This is how it works:

• Each Literature session consists of 4-5 texts, with questions associated with them. You do not have to answer all questions - only four per literature session, but belonging to different papers.
• An answer should be ca 1/2 page long (ca 300 words), so ca 2 pages in total per session.
• You work in study teams of 4-5 people. Within your study team, make sure you answer all questions (which means that some questions may be answered by more than one person). Share the answers with each other.
• You send in your answers individually, as .pdf no later than the deadline, which is Thursdays 23.59. If you meet the deadline you earn 5 points each time, which helps improve your grade.
• Name the file LittGroupNo_littNo_randomword, e.g. 1_3_lundgren_sunshine for the third literature session, and upload it to the dropbox.

Project: Portfolio

The examination of the course is to create a small portfolio of content that shows me (and yourself!) that you have learned the content of the course. The content of this collection is semi-fixed, and it should contain three items.

• A design exercise, called Animal Expression Transfer which combines designing for coherency, and a careful choice of interaction possibilities.
• An “old” exercise, already carried out during one of the exercise-sessions.
• A “new” exercise, i.e. one of the exercises that you did not carry out during the exercise sessions.

Read the details in the Project-description.