This is part 3 of a series started here.
3. Interaction design
These courses were taken with the consideration of building a future career in interaction design / UX design.
- Interaction Design Methods (link)
- Interaction Design as a Reflective Practice (link)
- Physical Interaction Design and Realization (link)
Interaction Design Methods course provided the basic knowledge of how an interaction designer works. Different types of designs were discussed (commercial design, experimental design, responsible design, discursive design), along with methods development (i.e: agile) and evaluation. One key concept from this course that I have used in many following courses is the Double Diamond process.
Read more here.
For the final project in the course, our group was tasked to redesign an internal student web portal called KTH Social.
While the previous course provided design theories and guidelines, in Interaction Design as Reflective Practice the students were encouraged to be more mindful of our design. One example of the concepts shared in the course was Wabi-Sabi, an eastern philosophy of imperfection that could be applied to product design. The course was a project course with a different theme each year. The theme this year was “misuse”. Students were tasked to choose an everyday object and design a novel misuse for the object, to repurpose the object. Our group chose water bottle, and came up with the idea to use the bottle as a water filter device. We imagined a connected filtering cap that could be attached to any standard PET bottle.
In Physical Interaction Design course, the focus was on the form elements of interaction design. The elements are the physical form (shape, color, texture, etc), interaction gestalt (action / performance of movements, touching, pulling, moving, etc), and the temporal form of the object (state changes, flow control). The course was also a project course, and the theme of the year was “robot”. Yes, we got to build a robot! By far, this is the course I enjoyed the most during this two year period. It even shaped an interest for the future that I want to work in the field of physical interaction design, moving away from screen and my previous interest in VR. Our group built the coolest sunflower robot ever. Check the following video to see it in action!
