LCC 6313 Principles of Interactive Design Janet Murray

Spring 2003 Tuesday and Thursday 9:30- 11, Friday 11-1

Skiles 010 (Recitation) and Skiles 346 (Lab)

Office hours: Mondays 3-6, signup sheet outside Skiles 335B

requirements | texts | schedule | project I | project II | project III | weekly assignments | skill portfolio | coweb

Course Requirements:

Three projects (20 % each = 60%)

Each project consists of a 2-stage set of deliverables:

- Preliminary Design/Implementation and Presentation

- Final Project including Implementation, written final Design Document, and in-class Presentation

One skill portfolio (10%)

Two weekly reports (10% each = 20%)

Class participation (10%)

Texts:

Janet Murray Inventing the Medium (MSS) available in weekly chapters in PDF in location to be announced.

Michael J. Hernandez Databases for Mere Mortals. Addison-Wesley Pub Co; 1997. ISBN: 0201694719 Chapters 1-10, 12, 14. Read 1-4 for week 6; rest for week 7.

Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus

http://shiva.pub.getty.edu/aat_browser/

Schedule

Week	Date	Tuesday	Thursday	Friday
1.	Jan 7,9	Designer's Stance	Designer's Stance:	Designer’s Stance
2.	Jan 14,16	Affordances of the Medium	Affordances of the Medium	Lab
3.	Jan 21,23	Lab	Lab	Project I Prelims
4.	Jan 28, 30	Affordances of the Medium	Lab	Lab (
5.	Feb 4,6	Lab	PROJECT I DUE	PROJECT I
6.	Feb 11,13	Encyclopedic Design: Categories, Nomenclatures Metadata	Encyclopedic Design: Relational Databases (Read: Database Design for Mere Mortals)	LAB
7.	Feb 18,20	Structured Documents, XML	Lab	Lab
8.	Feb 25,27	Networked Genres: News genres	PROJECT II prelims	Prelims cont. (hand in skill porfolio)
March 3-7 GT SPRING BREAK
9.	Mar 11,13	Encyclopedic Design: Cultural Issues	PROJECT II DUE	PROJECT II
10.	Mar 18,20	Procedural Abstraction: instantiation, parameters, modularity	Lab	Lab
11.	Mar 25,27	Final Project 2	Class: Encyclopedic	Lab
12.	Apr 1,3	Class: Procedural Design	Class: Procedural Design	Lab (OO Lingo)
13.	Apr 8,10	Lab (Replay Park)	Lab (Replay Park)	Lab (Replay Park)
14.	Apr 15,17	PRELIMS Proj 3	Prelims Proj 3	Free Lab (Passover and Good Friday)
15.	Apr 22,24	Summary	Final Projects	Final Projects (also: hand in skill portfolio)
16.	Wed 4/30	(DEMO DAY)

2 Weekly Assignments (for the week of your choice):

By the end of the semester you should have completed Assignment 1 and any 1 of the other possible weekly assignments, to be handed in on the subject and week of your choosing. We will review them regularly in 5 minute presentation units.

Weekly Assignment 1: Design Evaluation Assignment (REQUIRED)

Choose a web page or web site and evaluate it based on one or more clearly stated design criteria. What contributory discipline grounds your criteria? Post your critique as a web page, with screen shot or pointer to page/site you are critiquing. Do this with such clarity that you can present it in 5 minutes or less.

PLUS CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FOR ASSIGNMENT 2:

Summarize ~50 pages of the Recommended Readings in a web page or 5 minute powerpoint presentation.

Post a web page with pointers to multiple illustrations of uses of the same convention (e.g. rollover nav bar) or development of a subgenre (e.g. news site polls). Distinguish among the uses.

Post a web page with an analysis of the first appearance or history of a key GUI convention or other significant media convention.

Post a web page with detailed tutorial information related to the a production question raised by the labs.

Lead a 2 hour tutorial session on a production issue related to the class and of importance to student projects. Contribute 2 hours of designated consulting time afterwards.

Skill Portfolio (due week 8 and week 15)

Complete a portfolio of exercises completed during the 3 lab hours/week of this course. You can do the default exercises or you can make up your own program of study for mastering technical skills related to encyclopedic and procedural design.

3 Projects

Project 1:

Design or expand your existing individual professional web site. The goal is to provide a framework for an online portfolio that will help with the search for internships and post-GT employment, and illustrate the activities of the information design programs at GT.

The Project must include

- A web site that is functional and live on the due date

- An associated design document

The Design document must make clear that the web site:

- Is based on a clearly articulated set of design goals.

o Among its top-level goals should be exploiting one or more of the affordances of the digital medium

o The goals should be linked to validating criteria

o The goals should be linked to implementation strategies

- Has been conceived in the context of at least three other significant design examples (digital or non-digital) Demonstrably satisfy the articulated goals and assessment criteria

- Demonstrably satisfies the assessment criteria and their associated goals (or doesn’t do so for interesting reasons)

Note: Since the object of the assignment is to increase your facility in conceptualizing design, a well-executed site with a poorly executed design rational is not a successful project. Conversely, an ambitious but unsuccessful design with a well-articulated analysis of what went wrong (and what to do next) would not be a completely unsuccessful project. The most successful project would combine successful execution with well-conceived and well-articulated design goals.

Relation to Labs: Students are free during this course unit to use lab time in whatever way best furthers their own design goals. Students are encouraged to develop individualized production skill goals for this unit and for the semester as a whole. These goals will be supported as appropriate and possible within the resources of the program.
Project 2:

The goal of this project is to engage with a significant design issue of encyclopedic spaces. Students are encouraged to think big and small at the same time – to imagine a standardized, unified resource that allows retrieval of small grained segments for reassembly in significant juxtapositions. Projects can be focused on a single design aspect such as navigation, nomenclature, segmentation, or on an overall integrated solution. They can be weighed more toward design and less toward implementation or vice versa. Unlike Project I, you are encouraged to design beyond the boundaries of what you can personally implement, and beyond the boundaries of what can currently be delivered on IDT machines or on real-world networks.

The default project is to look at a particular genre of encyclopedic media that is moving into digital delivery and to design a data-base driven networked resource that exploits the affordances of the medium to increase our understanding of a complex area of human endeavor.

The default assignment is to pick one of these two domains:

A television series (documentary, reality, fiction, talk, news, how-to, commercial, educational, PBS, shopping, classic, new, short-form, long-form) that runs for several years and is also navigable as an archived set of videos. How would you segment and annotate it (e.g. all scenes with Elaine’s boyfriends, all news coverage of health care reform featuring Republican doctors)? How would you let viewers navigate it? What would be the value of retrieving segments from a synchronic archive in different segmentation and juxtaposition patterns from the linear broadcast? What if you knew from the start you would be producing segments that were retrievable in this way?
A news source with multimedia information archived and retrievable by user over a broadband network. (reference points: NY Times on line; Lexus/Nexus; CNN broadcast and website)

Here are some suggestions for other possible choices:

A unified repository of film art retrievable without concern for copyright (because of micropayments, rights management software, etc.) at any level of granularity for the study of film
A real-time framework for covering political debates with representation of multiple points of view and reference to documents that can help viewers understand the truth value, ideology, cultural coding, etc. of politician’s statements.
An interface and metadata/segmentation schema for creating, logging, and navigating a “database documentary” that follows multiple points of view on a controversial issue, or multiple communities living within the same area, or multiple versions of fictional event in a multi-sequential storyworld.
A site for entering critical tags on individual art works (or games or other catagorisable entities) so that multiple people contribute to an emerging schema that is consistent and illuminating. The Getty has done this for a well-documented body of artifacts; how would you do it for a relatively undocumented and open-ended body of artifacts, such as videogames or web sites?
A schema for university websites that is consistent, navigable, and serves multiple communities of users.
A schema for a Total Information Network used by a benevolent, security conscious (or a dictatorial, repressive) government. How would you demonstrate the potential of such a resource? How would you represent a single human being in such a schema?

Students can also use this unit to work on a similar topic of their own choosing or on the encyclopedic and aspects of an ongoing project. Consult with instructor on what will be appropriate, and have project approved in advance in writing.

Students can work individually or in self-selected (and instructor-approved) teams. The contribution of individuals must be clearly documented and mutually agreed-upon and the project must be a scale appropriate for a team rather than an individual.

Note on Labs: The labs in this unit will focus on SQL and PHP. Students are expected to gain sufficient expertise to generate a simple web page from information in a database. If you are coming into the course with substantial database experience, you can use the lab time to work on other self-defined goals. Alternately, students can use the time to work on research areas, such as the political implications of Total Information

Project 3: Procedural Approaches

The goal of this assignment is to use the concepts of procedural abstraction to organize a representation of complex behavior with interesting variations in outcome.

Students can use any procedural environment they are comfortable with to approach this assignment. The default choice is PHP or Flash. You should not limit your overall design to what you can program, but you should create a working prototype that can be demonstrated live, even if it does not have all the functionality of your documented design.

Choose a domain in which it is interesting to look at variations of the same template or pattern.

Project 3 Default Assignment

The default domain is the blind date or match-making romantic situation.

Create an application that runs through the many possible outcomes on a blind date. You can do this by modeling the people, the date, the relationship, the environment, the external events, or all of these. You can show the results with images, texts, symbols, comic book panels, animations, video sequences, or whatever else is in your power and appropriate to the task. You can model this task as sociology, comedy, parody, melodrama, farce, or genre fiction. How about a blind date as seen by multiple famous directors or Renaissance artists or stand-up comics? How about your mother’s idea of the perfect date versus your idea? How about a blind date in the different countries/cultures represented among the students in IDT? Remember the couple can be straight or gay, old or young, and they could go to the opera or a bowling alley.

You do not have to write the code that runs thru the variations, but you do have to diagram the structure of a computationally complex version of your story, even if you implement a more simple branching story. (Computationally complex = using concepts of inheritance, objects with methods, state)

Or Pick Your Own Procedural Problem

Substitutions are very welcome, including procedural aspects of your own on-going individual projects and projects drawn from tutorials or how-to books. (See the webmonkey.com site for some ideas.) You need approval of instructor before undertaking alternatives. Group work is also possible with prior approval.

Lab component: Labs in this unit will support PHP. Some support will be available for Director. Students are particularly encouraged to master object-oriented techniques such as inheritance.