Interaction Design History

The course curriculum hits the major milestones in computing history, developments in human factors and usability, developments in graphic and UI design, personal computing and interface design, the development of the internet and sweep of web design across the industry, information architecture and finally ubiquitous computing, internet of things and futures thinking around AR, VR, Robotics, AI and Machine learning.

My goal in the class, in addition to covering the main milestones, is to also highlight and reveal the stories of women and people of color in the field who otherwise have been left out, forgotten and erased.

I created a visual syllabus to accompany the traditional syllabus. The visual syllabus breaks down the important topics by time and also indicates to the students the major themes as well as major figures to be covered in class.

Weekly assignments include READ- papers and writings, WATCH - videos with designers and technologists and WRITE - a blog post writing based on a given prompt related to the weeks materials. Full syllabus and curriculum

In Fall 2020, students had material to watch and read and each week they were given a writing prompt based on that material. Students collectively wrote a blog about their thoughts on the material. They were asked to share ideas and design work and sketches related to the material as well as to write biographies of underrepresented designers from across the lineage. Their writings can be found at Interaction Design History Fall 2020.