The course will feature practical design and visualization work as core disciplines, and it will equip students to think, visualize, critique, facilitate and present design concepts in a business context. It will further focus on a critical, reflective understanding of design methods and their application.

The course will focus on design-centric research methods drawing on an interaction design framework. This entails visualizing, sketching on paper, developing simple prototypes in software, conducting, analyzing and presenting quick-and-dirty design ethnographies, user-centered design, participatory design, personas and scenarios development and an overall philosophy of iterative design processes.

The process of prototyping at early stages in the development process is emphasized in the course. Rapid iterations of lo-fidelity designs or mock-ups will be used extensively in the student design teams to “ask questions” and glean knowledge from the users and business contexts for which the teams design.
The literature will cover practical design methods derived from, and building on, Human-Computer Interaction methods and insights, as well as methodologies and theoretical readings in the humanities and social science.

Design teams and project work:

The outset for all of the coursework and the exam will be a student design project, and practical work is part of the in-class activities as well as workshops. Parts of the teaching will be lab-based, i.e. entailing engaged group work around the design of a product or a service.

The students will be using a prototyping application for their project work. It is expected that the students will have gained some competence with the application before embarking on the design project. The typical product is a prototype produced and presented in a particular medium (e.g. on a computer, a device, paper, or video).

All student design teams will perform a mandatory presentation of their ongoing work 3 times during the course, and prepare relevant questions to ask of their design (this is the “design crit” session, parts of which will be based on a design-space analysis/argumentation method).Doing their project, the students must work in 2-5 (3 or more being ideal) person design teams to be able to cover sufficient ground in the project in terms of data collection for the case context as well as to do timely design critique throughout the project. Interdisciplinary work and bringing different competences to bear is key for good projects.

The project (product) is of the students own choosing, and can include work that involves design for (and with) public sector services as well as private enterprise – note that for the area chosen, the students must identify and use 2 peer reviewed research papers.

It is expected (and highly recommended) that a group is formed and a project or case is defined as early as possible in the course period, so that work on the product (the prototype) can commence early.

Mandatory learning activities

• Group work in groups of 2-5 students
• 3 presentations of ongoing group work

The presentations are obligatory to the extent that the student groups will not be allowed to attend the examination unless they perform the presentations. 

During this course students will be required to hand in mandatory assignments (e.g. attendance, papers, exercises, presentations, productions), that need to be completed/approved before being eligible to register for the examination and e.g. being allowed to submit written work for examination. Failure to hand in these mandatory assignments on time will mean that the registration for examination is annulled.
These mandatory assignments are (Deadlines are posted separately, e.g. on the course blog):
* group work
* 3 presentations

Submission/completion of mandatory activities before Friday 2. December 2011 at 15:00.