Prerequisite courses for this course are: KD640A Introduction to multidisciplinary interaction design (passed) and KD641A Embodied interaction (passed)

The course addresses the role of interaction design for collaborative media, including design of innovative media “texts” as well as designing for collaboration and community. Academic maturity is ramped up by focusing on the fundamental craft skills of academic writing and reflection on research methods and results.

The course covers topical areas in interaction design for collaborative media, including key design elements in designing for prosumers, designing participatory media and designing grassroots media. Concerning analytical and critical perspectives, the course offers an introduction to media and communication studies as applied to interaction design and collaborative media, as well as analytical/critical concepts concerning, e.g., emergence, critical mass and virality.

On the level of methodology, the course focuses on intervention- and community-oriented design methods and techniques such as envisioning, mashups, social interventions, community-based participation and co-determination, and perpetual-beta development approaches.

Repertoire and theory

1. Building a repertoire of important design elements in collaborative media and multi-user interaction.

2. Developing familiarity with introductory media and communication perspectives on interaction design.

Skills and techniques

3. Displaying ability to execute interaction design techniques suitable for the design of collaborative media.

4. Displaying ability to execute further skills required in the craft of academic knowledge construction, and specifically to write short academic texts.

Reflection and criticism

5. Displaying some ability to analyze and criticize collaborative media and multi-user interaction using relevant analytical/critical concepts.

6. Displaying some ability to reflect on academic research methodology and epistemology.

Work in multidisciplinary teams on pertinent design topics within collaborative media, including innovative media “texts” and re-mediations as well as designing for community and collaboration. Writing individual academic short papers on the work. Critical review of academic publications in collaborative media and of fellow students’ papers, with special emphasis on research methodology and epistemology.

Learning outcomes concerned with designing and critiquing collaborative media (1–3, 5) are assessed in oral group examinations (studio crits). The learning outcomes that have to do with academic craft (4 , 6) are assessed in individual writing assignments, individual critical reviews and group review seminars.

The main literature is the below listed texts. Excerpts from books will be provided:

Balsamo, A. 2011. Designing culture – the technological imagination at work. Duke University Press.

Binder, T., Michelis, G. D., Ehn, P., Jacucci, G., Linde, P., Wagner, I. 2011. Design things. The MIT Press. (excerpts from this book)

Bishop, C. 2012. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artificial Hells – Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso Books, pp 11-40. (excerpts from this book)

Highmore, B. 2008. A sideboard manifesto: design culture in an artificial world. In: Highmore, B. (ed.) The design culture reader. Routledge, London, pp. 1-11.

Löwgren, J & Reimer, B. 2013. The Computer is a Medium, Not a Tool: Collaborative Media Challenging Interaction Design. Challenges, no. 4, pp86-102.

Manzini. E. 2015. Design, when everybody designs. An introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press. (excerpts from this book)

Simonsen, J. and Robertson, T. 2013. Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group. (excerpts from this book)

For each year, a selection of relevant literature will be picked. Example texts are listed below:

Dalsgaard, P., Halskov, K., Basballe, D. A., 2014. Emergent boundary objects and boundary zones in collaborative design research projects. In the international conference of Designing Interactive Systems 2014. pp. 745-754.

Ettinger, B. L. 2005. Copoiesis. In Ephemera - theory and politics in organization. Volume 5. Issue 4., pp. 703-713.

Harrison, S. Dourish, P. 1996. Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In the international conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1996. pp. 67-76.

Morgan, W. J. 2012. I and Thou: The educational lessons of Martin Buber’s dialogue with conflicts of his times. In Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 44, No. 9.

Norman, G. J. Cacioppo, J. T., Berntson, G. G. 2009. Social neoroscience. In Interdisciplinary Reviews - Cognitive science. Vol. 1. Issue 1. pp. 60-68.

Sartre, J-P. 1946, (1948 English version). Existentialism is a humanism (introduction). http://homepages.wmich.edu/~baldner/existentialism.pdf

Semin. G. R., Cacioppo, J. T. 2008, Grounding Social Cognition: Synchronization, entrainment, and coordination. In G.R. Semin & E.R. Smith (Eds.), Embodied grounding: Social, cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific approaches. New York: Cambridge University Press

Plenary discussion and individual written evaluation, focusing on the learning outcomes and the means for achieving them (learning activities, resources, course organization etc.).