Design education is taking on new forms at many universities around the world, since many people see that a designer today works in many different contexts with many different materials. In Europe, the Bologna reform of higher education is therefore timely. It offers a possibility to reflect and restructure design curricula for the changing world of design. In this paper we outline the development of a Bologna style curriculum for a Master of Science (two years) with a Major in Design at Linköpings universitet in Sweden. The Master's Programme in Design is multidisciplinary, and the guiding principle is that a designer of tomorrow will work less with specific materials and more within differing design contexts. A problem we faced with the studio classes was how to define progression. In order to structure the progression we identified a set of core competences for designers. These competences are used to define areas within which learning outcomes can be defined. The competence fields are; Vision & concept, Design methods, Tools & materials, User & actor perspective, Versatility, Design theory & research and Continuous competency development. Our conclusion is progression in studio classes can be structured in relation to these fields.

In stakeholder meetings during an interaction design project, prototypes are commonly used for creating shared representations of design ideas. It can, however, be difficult for designers and meeting facilitators to know which prototyping technique to use. In this case study we compare user interface sketches, scenarios, and computer prototypes, and analyse video material from six stakeholder meetings. The scenario did not facilitate a focus on aesthetic or ethical perspectives, nor did it facilitate operational or perceptual issues. The prototype did not facilitate discussions on the overarching concept of the design, to the same extent as the sketches did, but it did facilitate operational issues. The sketches gave the broadest discussion. The groups also approached the design differently; for example, the system developers constantly returned to a constructional perspective. This means that the choice of prototyping technique should be made based on the composition of the group and the desired focus of the meeting. © 2007 Maria Johansson, Mattias Arvola.

n the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed.

The importance of a skilled facilitator in design meetings with users is often emphasized, but less is said about how to improve the facilitation process. This paper reports experiences and lessons learned from facilitation of cardbased sessions in three design cases through an analysis of two sessions with users, and one session with professional designers. The analysis showed that many alternatives were not documented in the sessions with users who designed primarily by talking, compared to the professional designers who primarily designed by placing cards. We propose that facilitation, in cases similar to those presented here, could be improved by suggesting alternatives and possible consequences, prompt the participants to explore the consequences, and graphic facilitation.

We use the concept of digital literacy to refer to people’s competence of expressing themselves in computational form, and in this paper we specifically discuss the design of interactive technology aimed at letting children become digitally literate. A rarely discussed aspect of digital literacy in this respect concerns how it is supposed to take form in the context of improvised styles of use and interaction, resembling the kinds of activity commonly observed in kindergartens, school yards and centres for after-school activities. In such settings children often organize their own play activities, peers may go in and out of activities as they want, often without any necessary intervention by adult supervision. We align this kind of activity with the notion of ‘casual leisure’, and outline four basic challenges concerned with: a) a perspective on interaction, b) activity and context, c) the view of the user, and d) the character and role of the technology. We discuss these in relation to research attempting to design, evaluate, and make useful sense of children’s digital literacy in such activity. Our analysis identifies the sources of these challenges as due to expressions of tension between play and learning, between designers and users and a general striving for ‘hard fun’. The challenges and their consequences may be summarised as 1) the use of setting as allowing for spontaneous interactions, 2) the striving towards a participants’ perspective, 3) the incorporation of offline and social aspects into the design, and 4) the balancing of challenge with the easy and the accessible.

Sketching and design sketches are often recognized as key elements of successful interaction design practice and a central skill in interaction design expertise. Interaction design is a relatively young field without well-developed conventions, tools, and formalisms. We analyze the practical work and the conduct of interaction designers in how they express interaction and dynamics through whiteboard drawings. We focus on how talk and action were used to shape the meaning of the drawings. The ways the designers imagined that users would interact with the system and how it would mediate communication between users became topical through a web of drawings, talk, and embodied action. Our analysis forefronts three aspects of interaction design: 1) the role of the design material 2) the role of embodied action in interaction design, and 3) talk and embodied action as central means of doing design. We argue that the qualities of a design material need to be understood in relation to the activity in which it is taken into use and through the kinds of actions that the participants engage in. This implies that design representations do not carry meaning in themselves but are made meaningful through design activity.