Please make sure to follow directions provided on the first day of class. Most assignments will be submitted via a unique Slack Channel. Unless otherwise specified, reading responses should be roughly 250-500 words and should capture the breadth of the material presented.
Finalize Classroom Set-up
Ensure you have Slack installed properly on your machine and participate in group communication.
Reading
Read the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Craftsman. Write a 250 word response and upload it to the Assignment 1 Slack channel.
Studio Assignment
Create a work in the vein of The New Aesthetic. Use whatever medium you're most comfortable with—could be a written work, physical collage from pasted magazine images, digital artwork, etc. Upload it to the Assignment 2 Slack channel.
Reading
Read Chapter 7 of The Information. Write a 250 word response and upload it to the Assignment 2 Slack Channel.
Reading
Read Chapter 1, The Design of Everyday Things. Write a 250 word response and upload it to the Assignment 3 Slack Channel.
Be prepared to discuss the concepts of visibility, mappings, affordances, constraints, models and feedback.
Reading
Read Introduction: Rhizome of A Thousand Plateaus. Write a 250 word response responding to one of the prompts below and upload your response to the Assignment 4 Slack Channel.
Reading
Read "The System of Objects (pp. 255-83)", Selected Writings, Jean Baudrillard.
Choose an object (digital or physical) and define its value using Baudrillard's Object-Value System. Feel free to take a personal or a more collective perspective of the product.
Use this Bloomberg article showcasing products of both great form and function if you are searching for examples.
Reading
Watch the Ted talk by Andrew Stanton on The Clues to a Great Story. Write a response that discusses why storytelling is critical to a UX professional.
Reading
Skim through the Apple HIG, Google Material Design Guidelines, IBM Design Language and Microsoft Metro Design Language.
Write a response comparing/contrasting these design languages and the difference between skeumorphism and flat design.
Reading
Read Chapter 1 (The Unworkable Interface) from The Interface Effect by Alex Galloway. Think about interfaces in modern society and write a 250-word response regarding the reading. Upload it to Slack.
Reading
Read through the following essays on Dunne & Raby's website:
Why is their concept of critical design important in the context of commercial design? Where does it fit as a movement? Write a response exploring the concept of critical design. Put some thinking into your final project as well and how some of their tactics may be useful.
Letter of Intent
Write a concise response explaining your idea. Remember that this is an iterative process in which you will be able to refine your concept in the upcoming weeks. Describe your own expectations from the finished concept and explain the potential benefit you and others can have from it.
Inspiration
Create a mood board of related work that inspired your initial idea. This can be anything to frame a better sense of context around your idea—projects, color palettes, music, etc. Use a site like pinterest or nice.co and post a link to your board.
Provisional Personas
Identify your target audience and come up with two personas using the tactics we described in class. If you can’t find users to interview, come up with your best approach in doing so. If your project is more aesthetic in nature, user goals should be translated to user emotions (i.e., what feelings are you trying to evoke?). Identity the following for your users:
Diagram
Create a diagram of your experience. This will largely depend on the experience you are creating. If it’s a physical product, create a digital 3D representation of it. If it’s a digital products, a few screens and a user flow will suffice. Once again, this will largely depend on your experience. Annotate your diagram and ensure that you describe facets of it.
Revision
Rework your previous weeks iteration based on class feedback.
Assessment
Continue refining your experience, ensuring you keep your user goals at the forefront. Be sure to describe aspects of design we talked about early on: visibility, mappings, affordances, constraints, models and feedback. Write about how your experience addresses each of these principles.
Paper
Begin compiling your rationale (inspiration, personas, functional description, conceptual description) into a paper.
Presentation
Prepare a 5 minute presentation to present in-class on Monday, November 30.
Paper
Compile all of your rationale into a single PDF to upload. This is not an essay format, but rather, should be a single document with sections for inspiration, personas, functional description including diagram (i.e., how your experience works) and conceptual description (i.e., why you created this experience/what it means). If you have been following along with the assignments, this should not be very much work. You will have until December 7 @ 12PM to submit this document either via email or SLack.