Interaction and User Experience have progressed beyond the point where a design’s success is assessed based on completing tasks.  Today’s product and service experiences often must be clear and efficient, but they also have to convey MANY other values.  Projects in this studio will focus on multi-touchpoint interactions that are aimed at a purposeful outcome, but where the overall experience is also trying to convey a sense of something other than the transactional efficiency that dominates so much of the tech sector.  That something-else mixed into the experience might be sustainability, enjoyment (fun, even!), social equity, satisfaction, individuality, or one of myriad others.  Alongside, in many cases, a dominant facet of contemporary user experience is trust…establishing it, conveying that’s it’s well-placed, maintaining it, and so on.  The situation is complicated these days (and getting more so) by the fact that many user experiences happen in ways stakeholders (service provider, manufacturer, organization) have no control over (handheld/tablet, Alexa/Home, etc.).This course is a Branding/Graphic Design/Interaction Design/User Experience mash-up, with attention to all of those topics, at once.  We’ll typically be focused on individual-facing experiences (in home, mobile, retail, office, and gig-work settings) across myriad settings ranging from face-to-face to those technologically mediated by screens (all scales), physical computing devices (including IoT stuff), and voice (skills).  We will operate in a near-future technology landscape and create compelling and provocative experiences that foreground and explore how particular sets of values can be expressed and embodied in/by our design work.

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