Presentations in-class on September 15th
Documentation due online on September 16th
In any design undertaking, it is important to become intimately familiar with the lay-of-the-land. What has come before, who was behind those projects, how they worked, where they succeeded and failed…all of these facets combine to help guide the design of the new. Just as painters learn to understand the technique and artistry of the old masters by recreating their paintings, we interaction designers and researchers can learn by studying, deconstructing, and recreating the interactive masterworks of our time. We also want to start getting the whole bunch of you on the same page, in terms of background knowledge about the studio domain.
Activity
Each of you will be assigned an interactive master work that incorporates, in some way or another, devices that cooperate and interoperate, function collectively, and technologies that interact with people and environments in provocative ways. These will be drawn from a variety of domains, and in some cases they may require some squinting to see how they apply to the studio topic – others will be more spot-on and obvious. Some of the works are conceptual pieces that portray some idea of how devices can cooperate; others are relevant platforms or products that embody an important interactive or cooperative technology or idea. All of these pieces are touchstones that represent various directions in systems that have collaboration in their design (graphically and systematically) and marketing.
You are tasked with performing research to get to intimately know your piece, and then, using a combination of low fidelity prototyping techniques, to recreate the key modes of interaction, the look-and-feel, the impression it made, and so on. A person who knows something of the piece you are recreating should immediately find your prototyped interaction recognizable; a person who knows nothing of the piece you are recreating here should walk away enlightened as to what this work is famous for.
Be mindful of the interactive experience a user would have with this work; what inputs are available to the user? What did it look like? What responses would occur? How does the design of your work color the experience and relations of the users? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
As part of this assignment, you should create detailed sketches of the interactive experience in your idea log in some hand-drawn format (that is, not Powerpoint slides).
Presentation & Critique
The presentation of this work will be a cross between an elevator pitch and a love letter – you want to convince us that whatever your assigned topic was had a thread of sheer brilliance. Shoot for high production value—something you would be comfortable showing to external visitors. You can do your presentation with whatever media combination you like, although we have some guidelines below.
In 10 days, you will be presenting your rendition of your interactive masterwork in class. You will have 10 minutes to show and tell, and then we will discuss your recreation and the piece it represents for 10 minutes afterwards. Please finish your prepared talk with your sketch of the interactive experience, so that we have something to anchor our discussion of different aspects of the interaction.
It is okay to recruit your fellow students to assist with performing Wizard of Oz techniques and such for the presentation, but it should be clear that you are the one who’s directing the performance.
Documentation
Please summarize your work with a thorough written description of your master work, annotated photos of your recreation, and your interaction sketch. Create a pdf and post it to the course website on http://design.cca.edu by Friday, September 16th.
Evaluation
Evaluation on this project will be based on the quality of your research, your analysis of the masterwork’s salient features, the inventiveness of your recreation, and the quality of your presentation and the class’ subsequent discussion.
The Examples
1. Pleo or Paro [cute reactive technology]
2. Dark Star and/or Fifth Element [intelligent objects with attitude]
3. Remote Controls [B&O or Logitech Harmony]
4. Texai or VGo [people at a distance]
5. Swiss Army Knife or smartphones [convergence with compromise]
6. Majestic and/or Monopoly City Street
7. Corning Envisionment video [anti-convergence environment]
8. Sifteo and/or Cube World [more modern and capable reactive toy]
9. Swarmanoid and/or modular robotics [robots that work together]
10. Green Goose [gamification of life]
11. Smart Grid Appliances [efficiency-aware devices]
12. Reactable [objects on a sensate surface]
13. Apple iEverything [brand is everywhere]
14. Mini.com [marketing an object with an attitude]
15. Microsoft Bob and/or Apple Knowledge Navigator [icky personified helpers]
16. Kinect [interfaceless interfaces]
17. Cloud [Roku]
18. Turntable [social multimedia consumption]
Sony Aibo [cute responsive technology]
Cube World [modular toy]
Modular Robots [modules that self-assemble]
