Degree Programs

This course will consider the materiality and design of the interfaces that are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily lives. Perhaps the most important paradigmatic shift to take place in the Information Age has been the shift of cultural production from analog to digital technologies.  Digitization has caused a separation of media texts from specific physical media, thereby changing the material foundations of the field of cultural production.  Media texts have, in a sense, become immaterial, as they can be digitally produced and reproduced and then transmitted across any of a number of different platforms.  Students will investigate how interface design impacts the materiality of these platforms and shapes our experiences with the immaterial culture of the Information Age.  Topics to be covered include: a brief look at the material experience of early media interfaces, such as the telegraph, kinetoscope, and even the book; the importance of design in the field of personal technology and the cultural phenomena surrounding gadgets such as the iPod and Kindle; the impact of computer and computer peripheral design on leisure and work spaces; the evolution of the television as a focal point of domestic spaces; and the ways in which interfaces influence and shape creativity and freedom of experience in apparent and hidden ways.

Students will use a course wiki to build a repository of examples of different types of interface objects as well as create a log of their daily experiences with various interfaces (computers, phones, iPods, ATMs, etc.)  As a final project, students will then be asked to use the gathered resources in the wiki, course readings and discussion, and additional research to hypothesize what they see the future of design to be for a particular interface.  3 credits.