BA concept seminar structure:

Instructors:

Dr Joëlle Bitton
Prof. Dr Karmen Franinovic
Office hours by appointment

• The module takes place over 2 weeks, from 07.01.18 to 18.01.18, from Monday to Friday, 9.30-17.00 in room tba  - see calendar below for detailed sessions.
  Class sessions include lectures, discussions, mentoring sessions, in-class exercises, assignments and independent study blocks.
  Projects are conducted individually or with team of two students at most.

(1) Overview and Objectives

Students will develop a conceptual and practical exploration for their final BA thesis and present the experience they aim to create in the form of a 2-page thesis project description, a blog documenting the 2-weeks progress and a pretotype showing the core aspects of the interactive experience they are aiming to create.

The concept seminar addresses notions in preparation for their final thesis work:

- what does it mean to make a statement and a contribution to the field of interaction design?

- how to identify the design, social and experiential opportunities within the topic of interest?

- how to define a space of potential design explorations?

- how to narrow down the topic following own personal positioning, approach and interests?

- how to present the desired  embodied experience that the BA thesis should engender? 

(2) Course Outline

The 2 weeks are divided into two parts: an investigative week with quick exercises and iterations, and a second week where students can advance their pretotype,  engage in field or test study and summarise their BA idea and related experience in an appropriate narrative format (a video, a cartoon, a performance). 

See below for a detailed calendar.

(3) Expectations and Grading

Grades will be based on class participation, documentation (journal) and final work. 
Contributing to constructive group feedback is an essential aspect of class participation. 
Regular attendance is required. Two or more unexcused absences will affect the final grade. Arriving late on more than one occasion will also affect the grade.

Pretotype  25%

Interactive Experience 25% 

Project Description 20% 

Journal Documentation (exercises, findings) 20% 

Class participation 10% 

Any assignment that remains unfulfilled receives a failing grade.  

(5) Deliverables

• Pretotype

The pretotype is the manifestation of your ideas into a service, a product, a method, a user's experience, etc.

• Interactive Experience

The experience you want to create should be presented in a best suited format (a video, a cartoon, sketches, a performance). It should address both spatial and temporal aspects of the project.

• Project Description 

This 2-page text should answer the following questions :

• what is the context, topic, problem?
• who is your audience / participants?
• who will be touched by your design (which people/animals/plants, which locations, which systems, which ecologies)?
• what do you want to create and how it should work? 
• what values and potential do you want to address / generate? 

You may use a diversity of sources and bibliography (classified by genre: book, book chapter, journal article, conference article, academic thesis, newspaper article, web article, etc). 

• Journal/Blog

A separate 'Journal' is developed by each student that reflects on learnings from the seminar. It should be in the form of an online blog (ie. WordPress, Tumblr or other):

• The journal should be structured in a generally comprehensible manner (in the first week the structure will be provided by the course through the exercises)
• The lecture notes, including annotations, are stored
• Notes, sketches for each lesson should be included as well
  

Calendar

Journals