Interaction Design

Example Module from MA Experience Design – [the result of a slow evolution of Invisible Architecture Module from the MA/MSc Digital Futures Programme]

Module: ADA7106E Interaction Design

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.
Consider the art object in its total process: a behaviourable in its history, a futurible in its structure, a trigger in its effect.”

(Roy Ascott 1968)

The Interaction Design module draws on a rich history of research and production carried out by i-DAT and its close liaison with the Planetary Collegium and the international community (such as: ISEA, Leonardo, Ars Electronica) that they are entangled with.

As such the module provides unique access to a community of thinkers and makers who have contributed to shaping a fuzzy overlap between technology and culture, that goes under a variety of pseudonyms, such as Computational Media, New Media Art, Telematic Art, Ludic Design, Art & Science, SciArt and Transdisciplinary Arts, to name but a few.

Definitions:

A) Interaction Design crawled out of the primordial mud of Human Computer Interaction, and is fed by a drive to make bits and bytes tangible and interactable through GUI’s (Graphical User Interfaces), touchables, such as mice, pens and screens, global networks, wearables (rings, watches and mobiles), a variety of realities (Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Extended Reality (XR), the rise of Ubiquitous Computing, the Internet of Things, Smart City tech, and now being loosely rebranded through this mishmash as Spatial Computing, with the likes of Apple’s Vision Pro.

Interaction Design is clearly a Technology thing…

STOP, rewind, start again…

B) Interaction Design was born when art burst out of the two dimensional grave of the frame, through its three dimensional purgatory of the gallery, and into the fourth dimension of simultaneity, performativity and interactivity. The membrane separating the viewer and the objet d’art was well and truly slashed and all sorts of things began to leak through. Not least disciplines, the intertwingling go of the sacred towers of science and art started to cross breed, merge and interact.

Interaction Design is clearly a Cultural thing…

STOP, rewind, start again…

C) Interaction Design is a necessary process when communication emerges between: people (individuals, groups, communities and, institutions), creatures (animals, biological systems, interspecies, and ecosystems), environments (buildings, rural and urban systems, land/seascapes, ecologies) and things (IoT, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, sensors and networks. With all this cross species, environment and technology communication going on how can you hear the signal for the noise.

Interaction Design is clearly a Systems thing…

And so on…

NAND/NOR: A|B|C) Interaction Design is an transdisciplinary thing, let’s have a conversation…

Based around the Module Themes outlined below, the Interaction Design module will provide students with the creative and technical skills to apply interaction design strategies to develop and support their practice across a range of disciplines. Drawing from a wide range of technologies, techniques and tools, students will design and develop prototype systems that allows them to explore key issues relating to our lived experience.

Module themes:

Place: Urban Design, Public Place-Making, Network Infrastructures and Resilience, Mapping, Immersion, Societies of Control, Anthropocene.
People: Citizen Participation, Tactical Media, Urban Prototyping, Big (& small) Data, Psychogeography, Psychogeophysics, Gameplay, bio/interspecies.
Things: The Internet of Things (IoT), Sentience, Social Memory and Networked Objects, Ubiquitous Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Wearables, remote sensing.

And the traces they leave behind…

The Interaction Design module consists of:

Inductions into the Digital Fabrication, Immersive Media Lab and the Immersive Vision Theatre…
A series of lectures and workshops that explore the module themes, their histories and futures and deploy a speculative design approach to generate Provocative Prototypes…
A series of technology based workshops that introduce useful tools (such as Arduino microcontrollers, sensors and Unity 3D) for making your prototypes…

Reference:

Ascott R (1968) Control, London, 1970, Nº 5. And Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Stiles, K. & Selz, P. (Eds) University of California Press, 1996.

Images:

Flammarion wood engraving, 1888.

Phrenology: Chart Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Chart from ‘The Phrenological Journal’ (“Know Thyself”), print from Dr. E. Clark.

NELSON, T. H. Computer Lib/ Dream Machines: New Freedom Through Computer Screens—a Minority Report, Hugo’s Book Service, Chicago, 1974.

Interaction Design Brief…

You are required to develop and present a creative Provocative Prototype in response to the Module Themes and the materials and practices presented to you in sessions. This will be supported by a report and documentation of the design process (see assessment).

This brief is fundamentally practice-based and transdisciplinary. It can be approached from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, Game Design, Communications Design, 3D Design, Fine Art, Architecture, etc. However, you will be expected to push the boundaries of your comfort zone, experiment, speculate and fail enough times in the making of it in order deliver a viable Provocative Prototype.

We will introduce you to a variety of creative, technical, and theoretical design strategies so that you can explore Interaction Design and its relationship to the Module Themes: Place, People, and Things.

You will be expected to develop a sense of a personal digital practice which will engage with these themes.

You will explore how we interact with our environment or umwelt (Uexküll 1957), and how our internal architectures / prosthetic extensions / urban-city-rural or networked-remote senses, are understood and activated through interactions, digital processes and modes of participation and agency that allow us to imagine possible futures.

You will design and develop a Provocative Prototype system that allows you to explore key issues relating to a lived experience of the world. Fear not, many speculative Provocative Prototype models and examples will be presented and dissected as we proceed.

The Provocative Prototype you produce for Interaction Design should be a proof-of-concept that helps inform your practice and progress through your Master Programme. This is an opportunity to take risks, speculate, experiment, and provoke.

References:

Uexküll,Jakob von (1957). “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: APicture Book of Invisible Worlds”.
Image:
1: https://i-dat.org/murmuration/
2: Laura Beloff: https://www.realitydisfunction.org/
3: https://i-dat.org/tiwwa-a-quorum-project-tate-modern/
4: Inferno, Louis-Philippe Demers & Bill Vorn, 2016

Formative & Summative Assessments…

Your Provocative Prototype will emerge through two formative assessments…

ALPHA Presentation: – A formative assessment of a proof of concept that demonstrates the potential of the BETA version (during timetabled session).
BETA Presentation: (during timetabled session).

and a single summative assessed submissions:

Report & Prototype documentation (25%): A portfolio/blog of documentation and digital files, etc. Details will be negotiated on an individual basis.
Provocative Prototype submission (75%): The thing itself and promo video, details will be negotiated on an individual basis.

…

Learning Outcomes:

Demonstrate technical and creative knowledge and skills necessary to deliver an interaction design project.
Demonstrate the ability to speculate and innovate through practice, research and experimentation through methods such as prototyping.
Demonstrate a comprehensive awareness of underpinning research methods, theories and case studies relevant to the field of interaction design.
Effectively communicate an interaction design project to an audience of partners and peers, contextualising it within a specific disciplinary field.

…

Assessed Criteria:

Innovation and Creativity
Integration of technical, creative and contextual design skills
Research and critical context, Cultural, social or historical relevance of work
Response to place and space
Insight offered by online documentation, use of presentation material

…

Additional Information:

In addition to the specific marking criteria above, we will be assessing your ability to research, plan, produce and analyse your work according to the standard DAT criteria below:

Research and Investigation: The ability to employ an appropriate research method(s) to investigate, locate, select, evaluate and utilise data and source material as part of an effective research process.
Critical Context: Understanding of the historical, critical and theoretical frameworks relevant to the work in particular or the practice as a whole. The ability to locate work within a broader cultural context.
Innovation and Creativity: Innovation and creativity through practice by the dynamic integration of existing forms, the generation of new forms, or the radical appropriation and utilisation of components or the critical re--evaluation and appropriation of concepts. The demonstration of an experimental approach, risk taking, the speculative use of rational and intuitive thought.
Practical Competence and Realisation: The ability to realise a project, through the demonstration of an understanding of aims, audience, and context. Responsiveness and effectiveness in the deployment, utilisation and manipulation of appropriate skills, technologies and processes to fit the available resources. The ability to manage the process by which the product of the module is realised. The ability to successfully and appropriately integrate critical context and practical competence into a coherent and legible whole.
Analysis and Critical Evaluation: Demonstrating an ability for problem analysis, to understand, articulate and interpret the nature of the assignment, its context within the Programme and its broader context. To evaluate work through formative and summative critique. To learn from mistakes and problems and effectively utilise knowledge gained.

RWM [Read–Write Memory] (read/view/do/download)

Essential Reading:

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Kloeckl, Kristian. (2017). The Urban Improvise. Design Issues. 33. 44-58. 10.1162/DESI_a_00460.

NELSON, T. H. Computer Lib/ Dream Machines: New Freedom Through Computer Screens—a Minority Report, Hugo’s Book Service, Chicago, 1974.

https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines

Mark Shepard. 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. The MIT Press.

Auto-Illustrator Users Guide Signwave Auto-Illustrator 1.1 PDF.

C. P. Snow. 1959. TWO CULTURES. AND. THE SCIENTIFIC. REVOLUTION. THE REDE LECTURE. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. NEW YORK. 1961. https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf

Sollfrank, Cornelia, & Soon, Winnie. (2021). Fix My Code: Breaking points between Code and Culture. EECLECTIC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7696613

Tharp, M. and Tharp, S. M. (2019) Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.

Vear, C. (Ed.). (2021). The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429324154

Homo Ludens Ludens: http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/en/files/2008/exposiciones/homo-ludens-ludens-doc/HLL_cat_final.pdf-en/view

Roadmap to IoT:

Roadmap for interdisciplinary research- Culture, creative and design
Preparatory Studies Summary Report

ISEA Archive: https://www.isea-international.org/archive/new-archive/

Leonardo https://leonardo.info/leonardo: https://search-ebscohost-com.plymouth.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,shib&db=aft&jid=LEO&site=ehost-live

Recommended Reading:

Ascott, R. ([1990] 2003), Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?, in Shanken, E. D. (Ed.) Telematic Embrace -visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness, London, Univeristy of California Press Berkley and Los Angeles, California, 232-246.

Auger, James. Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital creativity (Exeter), 2013-03-01, Vol.24 (1), p.11-35

White Heat Cold Logic; British Computer Art 1960-1980, Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert & Mason, C. (Eds.), Cambridge, London, The MIT Press.

Dunne, A. (2005), Herzian Tales: electronic products, aesthetic experience, and critical design, MIT Press Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2001), Design Noir : The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel; Boston; Berlin, Birkhäuser

Elmo, Gum, Heather, et al. (2002) Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Plymouth: vivaria.net

Gray, Chris Hables., et al. The Cyborg Handbook. London ; New York, Routledge, 1995.

Haraway, D. (1991), A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge.

PhD: Dr B Aga: PROTOTYPING RELATIONAL THINGS THAT TALK: A DISCURSIVE DESIGN STRATEGY FOR CONVERSATIONAL AI SYSTEMS

PhD: Dr Jennifer Kanary Nikolov: LABYRINTH PSYCHOTICA – SIMULATING PSYCHOTIC PHENOMENA

PhD: Dr Laura Beloff: THE HYBRONAUT AND THE UMWELT: WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY AS ARTISTIC STRATEGY

PhD: Dr Chris Speed A Social Dimension for Digital Architectural Practice

{Other PhD recommendations in the ‘Stuff’ section…}

https://archive.org/

Visit MONOSKOP for access to a variety of texts.

…

Essential Viewing:

Google Experiments: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/little-signals

Google Experiments: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/experiments

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/inferno-elektra/3wWx8TZLQDg7Dg?hl=en