Outline
Advanced Design Studio: Experience Design
Spring Semester 2009, Department of Industrial Design, Rhode Island School of Design
Instructors
Matt Cottam: CEO, Tellart * Part-time Faculty, RISD ID and Umeå Institute of Design.
Maia Garau: Senior User Experience Consultant, Dynamic Diagrams * Adjunct Faculty, RISD ID
Over the past 50 years products have increasingly come to contain digital components. Only recently have we begun to augment and adjust our approach to industrial design to involve these new materials, sketching and prototyping techniques, and possibilities.
Interfaces for interacting with digital products have grown beyond just screens, switches, keyboards and mice to include sensors (touch, motion, heat, force) and actuators (light, vibration, motors, pumps). Our products don’t always wait for us to control them—they work as our agents checking our email, text messaging us when we win on Ebay, tagging our photos with GPS data.
Digital products today rarely act alone but are often interfaces to the networks and services they are connected to. Many products are now wireless and communicate over cellular networks and the Internet—connecting us, wherever we are, to our friends, our work, our cities. Faster and smarter networks are allowing our networked devices to be simpler, more granular, distributed and in some cases invisible, embedded, ambient.
This course proposes that these technological advancements and the way people use them invite a natural progression for the industrial design domain. Core industrial design skills (drawing, ideation, sketch-modeling in natural and synthetic physical materials, ergonomics, CAD and the creation of specifications for manufacture) are the ideal foundation on which to add the methodologies, materials and tools for designing interactive systems.
During this semester we will take a hands-on approach to understanding and designing with these new media. From the beginning of the course we will explore the topic of physical computing—sketching, designing, prototyping with software including Scratch, Flash, NADA, Arduino and Processing; and hardware including RFID, Arduino and a myriad sensors and actuators. We will connect our tangible, multi-sensory interfaces with the web, text messaging, twitter and other streams of information. We will also embrace the mantra of “fake it till you make it”—we will use diagrams, storyboards and comics, video and live enactment in parallel with physical computing to develop and communicate our ideas as they take form. We will explore and learn by doing.
There will be four core projects: 1. Time Based and Tangible Information, 2. Social Objects and Spaces, 3. Mobile Devices and the Networked City, 4. Science and History Exhibits. Timo Arnall (Touch Project, AHO Oslo) and Krzysztof Lenk (RISD GD) as well as a cast of other subject matter experts will lecture, demonstrate, critique.
Although no prior computing experience beyond Illustrator and Photoshop is required, students should expect a rigorous learning experience that will reward them with the competency to imagine and make interactive experiences.
[NOTE: A lab fee of $100 will provide each student with a starter kit of electronics. In addition students should expect to spend a minimum of $100 more dollars on materials as the course progresses].
