Origin was presented at this year’s Microsoft Design Expo in Redmond, July 18-19 as the UW IxD project responding to the design challenge ‘Get Connected, Stay Connected’

Origin is a file management system that tags your data the way your brain does.
In recognition of the shortcomings of current file management systems, Origin seeks to improve the way in which data is tagged, making its operation far more organic (or brain-like) than any typical system. By tagging data with contextual markers, it delivers users what they want, when they want it, without degrading opportunities to search for other data. Origin connects you with your files—it is a file management system that tags your data using contextual markers. Watch a video of the Origin presentation here.

Origin was developed in ART385 – Design and Society during Winter Quarter 2011 by

Vu Chu
Ben Mabry
Nick Smith
Daniya Ulgen
Jason Wong

This year’s design expo class was offered at the junior level in a studio class of 23 students. In five teams the class developed very different projects that address the theme of the expo – Get Connected, Stay Connected. The design process encompassed all stages of design development from the identification of common practices, salient needs, uncharted terrain and interesting design opportunities, followed by field observation, data analysis, ideation, conceptual design in many variations, and user experience prototyping. Rather than giving the class a specific design topic in the context of the design expo theme, It was important to us that the student teams each identified a design space where their experience in the team would make an interesting contribution. We started with a white sheet of paper and ended with video prototypes of each envisioned experience design that showcases interesting user experience scenarios that not only include the product or interface that would anchor the design, but also portrayed the context into which the design would be fielded and how it potentially could shape novel activities and engagements.

Context

Microsoft provides project partnership around the theme “Get Connected, Stay Connected”for the 2011Microsoft Design Expo. The Design Expo is a Microsoft Research forum where the top graduate interaction design programs showcase their prototype interaction design ideas. Design Expo showcases exceptional design process and ideas from schools around the world.  As part of a semester long course, students are asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 2-4 students, consider people’s real needs and respond with a user experience prototype, and narrative that explains their thinking.

A representative team from each school will be selected to attend and be featured in a presentation at the 2010 Microsoft Faculty Summit July 18-19, 2011 in Redmond, Washington.

The Design Expo creates a forum for spotlighting design, encouraging “out of the box” thinking, by exploring students’ visions for the future of computing as well as honing their presentation skills and engaging with students from other design teams from around the world to see how they approached this year’s theme.  Students often form lasting relationships with other students and this informal network has persisted from Design Expos over the years.

The Design Challenge:  Get Connected, Stay Connected

The 2011 design challenge “Get Connected, Stay Connected” explores the promise of real time data transmission and seamless connectivity.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, cameras and other sensors combined with cloud computing and pervasive connectivity, the technologies exist to greatly simplify the ability to get connected and stay connected.  How can we design for experiences that leverage these technologies to create new opportunities to engage with others in ever more meaningful ways?

This is a broad challenge – you should consider the the larger system of communications, collaborations, and emerging behaviors, but in your design we’d like you to specifically look at software that addresses fluidity in experience, sensor data integration, and natural interaction. Think beyond the software – how is the interactive experience integrated in everyday behaviors? How would it impact daily practices and lead to new behaviors, networks, communities, knowledge, etc ?

For current project updates from the the six UW IxD teams, visit the project blogs:

Time

Community

Social Phone

Connect to Yourself

Unconnected vs. Connected

Cartesian

In hospitals, Code Blue is generally used to indicate that a patient requires immediate resuscitation, most often as the result of a cardiac arrest. Within the medical field, such an event is known as a “code”. For the doctors and nurses working to save lives, distractions from the task at hand resulting in delays or mistakes literally may make the difference between life and death. Medical professionals are required to address the emergency, and revive the critically ill patient but also, as importantly, to produce documentation that is critical to the hand off the patient to other healthcare teams along the chain of care. As can be expected, in the rush to provide lifesaving interventions, real-time clinical documentation can take a back seat.

The existing protocol for documentation of code blue events requires the second nurse to arrive to record every significant event in written form. Observation of code blue drills at the hospital revealed that the demands of the situation do not permit everything to be captured in real time. In most cases, the documenter is only able to take brief notes which serve as an outline. Studies of similar real time documentation tasks show that in order to bridge missing information as result of the time pressure generated by cascading events during recording, additional information is added retrospectively after the conclusion of the event. As a result, documentation errors and omissions can occur.

In the course of this ongoing 2-year research project we are exploring how a work-centered interaction design approach can improve the documentation of medical emergencies – How can we faciliatate the real time recording of dynamic events, implemented into an interactive system to effectively support the care of the patient by enhancing the caregivers’ access to relevant information, and simultaneously generate a record of the sequence of conditions, treatments, and decisions made along the way.

ART 481 Field Studies: Design Research Techniques
Contextual research, observation techniques, and evaluation of design. Overview of the human-centered, participatory and collaborative design process. Focus on connecting insight from research with design ideation. Emphasis on methods for identifying prospective user populations, studying actual use and associated expectations, explanations, and needs of users as basis for design. Field research, data collection, evaluation, and presentation of research process and findings.


ART 483 Advanced Projects In Interaction Design
Quarter long design project addressing a complex, openly defined Interaction Design challenge in an everyday setting/consumer project/system context. Design process entails formulation of design scope, contextual research, observations of use, conceptual models, scenario development, conceptual design, prototyping, and evaluation, and design documentation conducted in interdisciplinary design teams.


ART 485 Senior/Degree Project In Interaction Design
A quarter long individual (or small team), advanced Interaction Design project. Students identify and develop a design project of their choice to demonstrate command of a repertoire of interaction design skills and knowledge that meet the criteria expected for graduation.


ART 488 Professional Practice
Portfolio and Interview preparation workshop.

Microsoft provided a forum around the theme “Service meets Social” to showcase exceptional design process and ideas. As part of a quarter long course, students from five invited international Interaction Design programs (Carnegie Mellon, Art Center College, NYU Tisch School, Universidad Iberoamericano Mexico City, Central St. Martins College of the Arts, and University of Washington / IxD) were asked to form interdisciplinary teams of 4-6 students to design a user experience prototype, encouraging out-of-the-box-thinking, and engaging with students from other design teams from around the world in exploring implications of digital and physical worlds as these intersect where service meets social.

Interaction Design ART483 students Andrew Battenburg, Minnie Bredow, Tim Damon, Sophie Milliotte, Jon Sandler, and Tanya Test presented their project ‘OpenDoor’ at the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond yesterday.

Watch part 1 of the OpenDoor presentation
Watch the OpenDoor video prototype
Watch part 2 of the OpenDoor presentation

OpenDoor design process documentation (PDF)

OpenDoor is a mobile application that enables neighbors to share their resources. Our goal for individuals is to provide each member of the community with free goods and services. At the collective level, our aim is to develop sustainable local communities.

Rather than a large database of goods and services, the design relies on common interests: people who share a common interest will be more likely to need the same goods and services. As a community-driven service, OpenDoor focuses on the social by emphasizing direct relationships and face-to-face communication between neighbors.

Trust is established by constraints in location: A new member can only register in one neighborhood – this home base defines the proximity in which prospective exchanges can be posted and searched. OpenDoor participants build their profile by defining their interests and needs. When an OpenDoor participant looks for a good or service, the system will show the profiles of the neighbors that are most likely to have what they are looking for. OpenDoor participants send a direct request to these neighbors through the system. If the neighbors agree to meet, OpenDoor will automatically put them in contact over the phone.

OpenDoor participants can specify if their search is a regular inquiry or an immediate need, depending on the situation in which they are in. When there is an exchange between OpenDoor neighbors, their real world meeting is exemplified as a physical interaction that is the bump between their phones so that the exchange is documented like a receipt: both the lender and the borrower can track what needs to be returned when and to whom. In summary/big picture review, the system provides statistics on how much the user and their community saved thanks to OpenDoor.

OASIS focuses on interaction design challenges that naturally result from sensor-based perception and object awareness. The system treats physical objects as tangible encapsulations of context. From the perspective of an interaction grammar, objects are thus nouns to which we can bind virtual actions (i.e., verbs). In this hybrid physical- virtual system, actions are always virtual and are not physically instantiated. The home is especially well-suited to this style of application because it is an object-rich and activity-rich environment where activities and context can often be inferred from visually observable data. The OASIS system blends physical objects with virtual actions to create new everyday in-home applications. OASIS is illustrated using kitchen-based examples, but the system and interaction methods are designed for a broader range of hybrid physical-virtual applications. Interactive elements of the system include linking a single physical object to multiple possible actions, smoothly mixing virtual and physical objects, creating new objects, deleting objects, saving instances for later use, and grouping physical and virtual objects into collections.

OASIS has been featured in WIRED, MIT Technology Review, and PC Magazine. Watch a video demo of OASIS here

Download our Interaction Design MFA Concentration Handout pdf.

Graduate students who pursue the concentration in Interaction Design have opportunities to build expertise during research and teaching. They have access to the resources of UW’s strong HCI community — the DUB group is a coalition of HCI/design faculty and researchers from partnering departments — amongst them the Departments of Human Centered Design and Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, and the Division of Design. The University of Washington’s HCI/design coalition is considered one of the Nation’s top programs. Among the Nation’s leading public research universities, the University of Washington offers a complete spectrum of majors on a thriving campus of 38,000 students. Located in Seattle, a Pacific Northwest center for high-tech development in medicine, aviation, and computer science, the University of Washington has strong ties with leading research centers and industries such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, Adobe, Boeing.

Graduate Student Profile
The ideal candidate for graduate study in Interaction Design is an individual with: 1) an undergraduate BA or BFA degree in Interaction Design, Industrial Design or Visual Communication Design, and 2) several years of experience in professional practice. We believe that graduate study is most beneficial for those who have had an opportunity to broadly experience both theory and practice in the field. Generally speaking, these are the candidates best prepared to identify specific areas of interest/focus during the short duration of a master’s program.

However, in certain instances the program will consider students directly from an undergraduate design program. These students must demonstrate substantial intellectual and form-giving capacity, as well as the ability to work and think beyond the basic tenets of an undergraduate/bachelor’s degree program. The Interaction Design faculty is also willing to consider candidates who have an undergraduate degree in a field allied with or related to Interaction Design — for example, Computer Science, Usability Engineering, Human Factors, among others. These candidates have typically experienced specific aspects of design in a professional setting, and wish to expand their knowledge of design while still leveraging a previous academic background. Such students are considered for a three-year program where they must complete a year of preliminary undergraduate studios (and pass a faculty review) before continuing to graduate-level coursework.

Prospective students interested in the MFA in Industrial or Visual Communication Design with a concentration in Interaction Design need to apply either for the MFA in Visual Communication Design or Industrial Design and Indicate their interest the in Interaction Design concentration in their cover letter. For questions about the program contact Prof. Axel Roesler.


Facilities
The Division of Design provides dedicated studios with individual desks for all design graduate students. The School of Art Computing Center has extensive resources for scanning, printing, video and audio editing, authoring, and 3-D modeling and animation. The Division of Design also provides model shop and rapid prototyping facilities. Extensive video and sound production facilities as well as photo, video and audio equipment is available through the School of Art Computing Center and several other media centers across campus.

The IxD Lab is a work space dedicated to Interaction Design projects, equipped with computer work stations and meeting space to facilitate prototyping and research team work sessions.


Teaching Assistantships / Scholarships
The Division of Design offers several teaching assistantships  for qualified graduate students. In this capacity, graduate students are awarded a tuition waiver and stipend for assisting a faculty member in large (60–150 seat) introductory (100 and 200 level) undergraduate courses. Graduate students often find teaching assistantships to be a valuable experience during their course of study. Teaching Assistantships are competitive and will be distributed among the best qualified graduate students across the three MFA concentrations, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, and Visual Communication Design.

The Interaction Design concentration offers a scholarship award, and a teaching associateship to qualified applicants. The concentration also provides support for travel to conferences and specific study abroad opportunities, such as the UW Rome program in Design. Additionally, when available, thesis projects may receive partial financial support from the program.

IxD projects and design process

IxD Gallery
UW IxD photo stream

pending FCAS and HCEB approval

Interaction Designers define the structure and behavior of interactive products and services. Interaction Designers create compelling relationships between people and the interactive systems they use, from computers to mobile devices to appliances; Interaction Designers lay the groundwork for intangible experiences.

Visit the Interaction Design Blog for news about the program, additional resources, and most recent interaction design work.

The need for interaction designers for the development of new interactive products, systems and services has increased exponentially in recent years in virtually all industries. Interactive systems are present in many areas in everyday life where people coordinate tasks and engage in activities in collaboration with others, facilitated through technology. Examples range from mobile phones to computer software, from GPS systems for cars or navigation in the open ocean, and information systems that support the work of expert practitioners in technology-driven domains such as aviation, medicine, and process control.

The design of interactive systems poses new types of challenges for designers. In the course of the interaction design sequence, students are introduced to the opportunities for designing interactions. They learn how to identify design problems in interactive devices, systems, and services. They learn how to respond to these design challenges by a) applying observation techniques to understand interactions in context, b) develop conceptual models and representations (stories, scenarios, mock-ups and prototypes) to assess the perspectives of prospective users (understand their understanding) in the course of a participatory design process to develop interactions that are useful, understandable, and useful.

Download the major requirements chart pdf.


Courses
Prospective majors should plan to take ART 166 in their freshmen year. During the sophomore year, all design majors (VCD, ID and IxD) enroll in a shared series of studio courses. Major selection occurs at the end of Sophomore Year, and is based upon performance in the Design Sophomore Studios.
Please note: With the exception of ART 166, ART 208, ART 383, ART 387, and ART 483 all Design courses are reserved for majors only during the regular school year. Non-majors and non-matriculated students are welcome during the summer quarter.


YEAR ONE


ART 166 Design Foundations
The rudiments of visual structure and problem solving in two and three-dimensional design. The course emphasizes design methodology and design processes with emphasis on the formal principles of composition and organization. These subjects are the foundation for all subsequent studio courses in the Division of Design. Required for application to all design majors (Visual Communication Design, Industrial Design, and Interaction Design).


YEAR TWO


ART 207 Design Drawing
In this course students engage in rigorous drawing activities to gain an understanding of the power and importance of drawing as a creative and communicative tool. Clear structuring of space as well as formal compositional elements and their intrinsic relationship to representational drawing are explored. At the end of the quarter, students are challenged to communicate design ideas through sketches from the ideation phase through to a final solution that fully describes the aesthetic, 3D spatial relationships, materiality, and emotive intents.


ART 208 Design History
This course provides a comprehensive survey of the ideas, events, and individuals that determined the design of information, objects, culture, and commerce across societies. Students examine the social, political and cultural contexts that shape graphic design and the ideologies and relationships of similar movement in art and architecture.


ART 209 Typography
In this course students focus on type as image and the relationship between visual and verbal language. Type terminology, typographic history, technical issues related to typography will be examined. Type hierarchy and scale are also studied.


ART 210 Color + Composition
This course will explore the fundamentals of color, form-making and composition within the field of design. Through a series of exercises, lectures, readings and applied projects, students will develop an understanding of how to use color and form to visualize ideas in a unique and compelling way.


ART 211 3-D Foundations
An introduction to the aesthetic fundamentals of 3-dimensional form. Lectures and studio exercises allow students to explore the articulation of form and space in both abstract and applied scenarios. Prepares design students for subsequent work in all division majors (Industrial Design, Interaction Design, and Visual Communication Design).


ART 212 Introduction To Interaction Design
Introduction to Human-computer Interaction, interface design, and interactive and time-based media for designers. Overview of foundational interaction design concepts such as human factors, perception, cognition, research techniques, and design methods for the design of interactions.


YEAR THREE


ART 381 Case Studies In Interaction Design
A survey of interactive products, systems, interfaces and technology (software and hardware), constraints and trajectories for future developments and how these frame Interaction Design and production. Workflow, planning and organization of prototyping in Interaction Design.


ART 383 Fundamentals Of Interaction Design
Key concepts of Interaction Design: Representation, explanations, expectations, conceptual models, feedback, and affordances. Investigates the relationship between representations, new visualization technologies, dynamic/animated content, and interaction patterns. Interaction Design process and methods.


ART 384 Information Visualization For Interaction Designers
Information visualization concepts and principles for interactive information systems, interactive instructions, and animated information graphics. Interaction concepts and patterns, representation, and interpretation strategies for sequential and time-based information.


ART 385 Design Innovation And Society
Impact of interaction design and interactive product/systems on everyday life, expert domains, and knowledge. Case study analyses of innovation and theoretical frameworks and critical discourse in the relationship between design, technology, and society.


ART 386 Visual Storytelling
Narrative, storyboarding, scenario development and visual, sequential, and interactive presentation of stories as vehicle for design communication and scenario development. Overview of workflow, organization, and production of visual storytelling. Narrative and character development, imaging, editing and design visualization for video prototyping of interaction design concepts.


ART 387 Physical Interaction Design
Quarter long intermediate IxD studio, project focus. Exploration of interactions mediated by interfaces, physical products, and environments. Design development of innovative interactions and novel interactive technologies and their integration into existing practices and future directions for interaction. Experimental focus.


YEAR FOUR


ART 481 Field Studies: Design Research Techniques
Contextual research, observation techniques, and evaluation of design. Overview of the human-centered, participatory and collaborative design process. Focus on connecting insight from research with design ideation. Emphasis on methods for identifying prospective user populations, studying actual use and associated expectations, explanations, and needs of users as basis for design. Field research, data collection, evaluation, and presentation of research process and findings.


ART 483 Advanced Projects In Interaction Design
Quarter long design project addressing a complex, openly defined Interaction Design challenge in an everyday setting/consumer project/system context. Design process entails formulation of design scope, contextual research, observations of use, conceptual models, scenario development, conceptual design, prototyping, and evaluation, and design documentation conducted in interdisciplinary design teams.


ART 485 Senior/Degree Project In Interaction Design
A quarter long individual (or small team), advanced Interaction Design project. Students identify and develop a design project of their choice to demonstrate command of a repertoire of interaction design skills and knowledge that meet the criteria expected for graduation.


ART 488 Professional Practice
Portfolio and Interview preparation workshop.