BSc. and MSc.

Course Description

In Coding IxD, we co-educate computer scientists and product designers. Beyond experiencing interdisciplinary work, we want students to envision interactive and responsible systems: by this, we mean a responsibility through code that is carefully using material, form, and context, while profoundly respecting both human capabilities and vulnerabilities. We understand this course as experimental space, where different perspectives meet, exchange, and evolve. Each semester, based on small project teams of up to four members, students are challenged to examine a specific application context. Within this context, the teams envision new application or product concepts.

We guide this process through various carefully tuned methods that are used to spark their ideas. Students iterate through several rounds of ideation and refine their concepts in different prototype versions. The most compelling or promising interaction concept, the one that allows grasping the quality and essence of the product concept is implemented in a working prototype. Students are accompanied by a team of experienced designers and computer scientists but also by guest experts that provide feedback to the various design iterations. If needed, special workshops are organized to cover specific topics ranging from prototyping to project management. The whole course is evaluated continuously to enhance our methodological toolbox.

This course offering is a cooperation of the Human-Centered Computing Research Group at the Institute of Computer Science at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Product Design Department at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (KHB).

Besides the regular weekly meetings, the KHB and FU Berlin provide complimentary workshops:

• Arduino Workshop on Monday 24.10. and 31.10. | 10:00 am to 1:00 pm
• AR Experience Workshop on Monday 14.11. | 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Here you can find our Code of Conduct.

Topic of this semester: Let’s get: PHYSICAL — Materializing Routines with Personal Data

Find the course description for this year’s topic on Let’s get: PHYSICAL

The course takes place in cooperation with the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. We meet every Wednesday in the laboratory of the Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity" at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
www.matters-of-activity.de/en/

Literature

Zimmerman, John, Jodi Forlizzi, and Shelley Evenson. "Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 2007.

Pierce, James, et al. "Expanding and refining design and criticality in HCI." Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015.

Jansen, Yvonne, et al. “Opportunities and Challenges for Data Physicalization.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2015, pp. 3227–36. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702180.