Teaching embodied interaction design practice

Abstract

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright © 2005 AIGA | The professional association for design. Increasingly, user experiences are addressing our interactions in the world—the physical, the social, and the situated. This sketch presents our experiences introducing embodied interaction themes to a projectbased Interaction Design studio course. We present and discuss examples of student-created designs, illustrating the relationship between these design methods, domains, and artifacts created. These in-the-world domains and methods appealed to budding interaction designers because it encouraged them to transcend the computer screen and design for the world at large. However, the challenge of effectively evaluating in-theworld interactions inhibited iteration. Balancing observation, craft, and evaluation was critical to project success, and we are exploring how to help students navigate these process tradeoffs.