History & Future of Interaction Design

Do we design tools to serve human purposes, or adapt our purposes to the tools at hand? Generative tools that let users state outcomes rather than steps give new force to this long-standing question in interaction design. This studio course pursues this through milestones in the field's history, among them, Memex, Musicolour, the Fun Palace, Sketchpad, the Architecture Machine, and Dynamicland. For each, we ask what it achieved, where it reached its limits, and how it reads differently now. Students research the systems they find most compelling and test those systems' central ideas through prototypes built in short sprints. In a final project, students demonstrate a speculative interface that engages questions posed by adaptive interfaces and, if they choose, world models. The final project is framed by the historical methods developed over the semester and the moments when they can no longer contain the present.