We finally start to hear about the origins of Interaction Design as a distinct practice. It still doesn’t have the official name yet but Bill Verplank, talks about the work of doing interaction design.
Read about the concepts for the Personal Dynamic Media — Dynabook — concept put forward by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg in 1972. This concept predates the first tablets by 15 years and tablets by Microsoft or Apple by twenty years. They prototyped what they thought the future of computing might be — “ personal computer for children of all ages”. How right or wrong were they?
Readings for the week included reading about the Personal Dynamic Media from the New Media Reader and reading a chapter about industrial design ethics from a series of essays by Vilem Flusser as well as watching these videos of Bill Verplank talking about the practice of interaction design before it was called Interaction Design.
Designing Interactions (Vimeo)
Bill Verplank’s Opening Keynote from IXD 11 conference (Vimeo)
Coexisting Alternatives (Vimeo)
Human In the Center (when was Interaction Design coined?) (Vimeo)
There are several more in the collection.
The other part of the week I had students to read a piece of science fiction and sketch the interactions described with annotations as a practice of visioning the future.
Note: All these lectures were delivered via video with related slide decks of images. Following the intro, students had a series of readings and videos to watch related to the topics covered in the lecture or the overall time frame. They were then given a set of prompts to stimulate their thinking and writings which ended up in a class blog.
Silicon Age
Silicon Age: The Mother of All Demos, intro lecture 6
Industrial Age
Industrial Age: Mid-Century Designers, Designing For People, intro lecture 5
Industrial Age: Between the Wars, intro lecture 4
Industrial Revolution & Manifestos, intro lecture3
In the Beginning
Read intro lecture 2 — In the Beginning Part 2
Read intro lecture 1 — In the Beginning Part 1
Setting the Stage
See the visual syllabus and how I approached putting this class together
