Principles of Interactive Design

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LCC6313 Principles of Interactive Design

Class Hours :

Monday & Wednesday 10-12 Skiles 343

Friday 11-1 IDT Lab Skiles 346

Office Hours :

Murray: Skiles 335B Monday 3-5 (sign up sheet outside door)

Bolter Skiles 017 Wednesday 1-3

Aims of the course :

To ground the design of digital artifacts in clear principles of design, based on an understanding of the computer as not merely the inheritor of formats and conventions drawn from older media, but as a medium of representation with its own affordances. To develop the designer's stance, in which every individual design problem is seen from the vantage point of inventing the medium itself -- developing the digital environment as a coherent and evocative medium of expression. The two foci of the course are information spaces and procedural environments. Among the topics covered: scripting the interactor, agency; data abstraction, databases and archives, structured documents, segmentation and granularity, searching and browsing, categorization, metadata, controlled vocabularies, navigation and overviews; interactivity, scripting the interactor, agency, instantiation, modularity, conditional branching, objects and behavior, inheritance, state.

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Readings

Janet Murray's Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interactive Design (MSS in progress)
Draft sections and outlines will be handed out in class

Geoffrey. Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr. Sorting Things Out (Inside Technology)paperback MIT PressMIT Press; ISBN: 0262522950

Terry Winograd Bringing Design to Software (1996) paperback Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201854910, Chapters 2,3, 4, 8,9, 12.

Michael J. Hernandez Database Design for Mere Mortals (1997) paperback Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201694719 Chapters 1-10, 12,14

4D: tutorials and reference information for dynamic html and database-driven web pages A site made with and explaining the use of MySQL and PHP

Recommended

Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web O'Reilly paperback O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 1565922824 (Chapters 1-5, 8)

Jennifer E. Rowley, Organizing Knowledge. paperback: Hampshire En gland:: Gower 1992(2nd Edition) ISBN 1-85742-00505 . Chapters 12-18

Phil Gross and Jason Roberts, Director8 Demystified (2000) Peachpit Press ISBN 0-201-70920 1. especially good for explaining Director's faulty design in terms of more helpful computational concepts

Lingo in a Nutshell (O'Reilly series). Reference book for coding

Requirements

Project I Dramatic Agency Project 20%

Project II Film Archive Project 20%

Project III News Archive Story 20%

Project IV Modular Story World 30%

Class participation including regular attendance, active participation in discussion,
constructive contribution to design critiques, in class report,.
10%

Helpfulness, resourcefulness, contribution to course functioning 5% bonus points

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Schedule

week date Monday (lecture) Wednesday (reports) Friday (lab)
0

1/4

   

Show Glorianna Davenport: birds

(Give reading assignment)

Flash Tutorial

1

1/7

1/9

 

1/11

Winograd, Bringing Design to Software: Introduction, Chapters 2-4.

 

Winograd: Chapters 8-9, 12.

 

Flash Tutorial

2

1/14

1/16

1/18

Designer's Stance

Affordances of the Medium 1

Scripting Participation

 

Report: Kids Room

Report: DOGZ

Report: Duck Amuck

Flash Tutorial

3

(1/21)

1/23

1/25

Monday Holiday

 

Affordances of the Medium 2

Project I: Dramatic agency Flash project

4

1/28

1/30

2/1

Information Spaces : how do you represent a film?

(JHM)

Review AFI Catalog

Structuring information into knowledge

Categorizing, Labeling, Granularity of segments

Report: Griffith Project

Report: VSR

Report: FFC

 

Patrick/Alex/Cassie PHP my SQL

(Janet out of town)

5

2/4

2/6

2/8

Databases for Mere Mortals: Chapters 1-4

(Janet out of town)

Databases for Mere Mortals, Chapters 5-9

Report: Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus

Databases

Patrick/Alex/Cassie PHP my SQL

6

2/11

2/13

2/15

Databases for Mere Mortals, Chapters 10, 12, 14 Project II: Film project draft due

Free Lab

 

 

7

2/18

2/19

2/21

News Genres (JHM)

News project: convergence of TV and print into multimedia archive/broadcast environment

 

Reports:newspapers

Reports: tv news

Reports: magazines

Project II: Film project due

Patrick/Alex/Cassie PHP my SQL

8

2/25

2/27

3/1

Taxonomy (JDB)

Report: W3C

Report: XML case studies

(Janet out of town)

(Begin reading Bowker and Star)

(Janet out of town)

XML/Structured Documents

9

3/11

3/13

3/15

Metadata and Catagorizing (JHM)

 

Report: Dublin Core

Project III: News Draft

Metadata, Structured Documents

 

 

...

Free Lab
10

3/18

3/20

3/22

Bowker and Star, Sorting It Out: Introduction, Chapters 1-3.

Report: SIO: world diseases

Report: SIO: nursing

(Janet out of town)

Read: Sorting it Out: Chapters 5-6, 10.

Report: SIO: Tuberculosis, Chapter 5.

Report: SIO: Race, Chapter 6.

Project III: News Project Final

(Janet out of town)

11

3/25

3/27

3/29

Replay Story Assignment

Look at: previous years' examples

Procedural Abstraction (JHM)

modularity, objects and inheritance

Director scripting tutorials

Object oriented programming

variables, attributes, classes, objects, states, instantiation, function calls

12

4/1

4/3

4/5

Object Oriented Programming (javascript)

Storyboard version of Project IV

Director

(Jay out of town)

13

4/8

4/10

4/12

Procedural Abstraction 2 (JHM)

Behavior of objects, state

Reports: Game design Director
14

4/15

4/17

4/19

Kaleidoscopic Design (JHM)

Draft version of Project IV

Free Lab
15

4/22

4/24

4/26

Designing for Innovation (JHM)

Final version of Project IV

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