Course Outline

This skills-based studio will expose students to emerging and fast-changing digital practices for interaction design. The course aims to help participants gain a deeper understanding of the more recent advances in technology, identify design opportunities, establish ways to evaluate, as well as address ethical implications. Short projects and studio activities will provide the opportunity to experience a variety of new software and hardware options that are used in web-based, mobile and sensor-based technologies. May include web-stack software, technologies for mobile and other new platforms, and Processing and contemporary open source standards.

• Examine and evaluate emerging technologies, including Extended Reality, Generative AI, Multi-Sensory Experiences, Intelligent materials, AI & Ethics, Gestural Interfaces, and Rapid Prototyping.
• Analyze, evaluate, and critically reflect on the design of human-centred solutions for current and emerging design, social, and cultural issues.
• Adapt human-centred design processes to technology-oriented perspectives.
• Apply prototyping techniques to help envision future applications of emerging technologies.
• Explain and evaluate the role of emerging technology in a changing society.
• Understand the relationship and effects of design on the development of emerging technologies.
• Assess the significance of the ethical and socio-cultural implications of current technological trends.

Emerging technology stops emerging. A course organised as a tour of the technologies current in 2026 is out of date before the term ends, so this studio is organised around method: the technologies are the case material, and the same loop — scan, probe, take a position — runs across all of them.

Two structural commitments follow from that.

You keep one human domain all term. In Week 3 you claim a domain — care, labour, food, mobility, memory, dying, play, shelter, money, language, energy or waste — and every technology after that arrives as an input to your domain rather than as a topic to survey. This is what buys depth without giving up breadth, and it is what makes critique worth attending: everyone is looking at a different world through the same lens.

You build probes, not products. You build to ask a question, not to ship. A probe can be ugly, partial or non-functional and still be excellent, if it makes something legible that was not legible before. Documentation fidelity is what is marked; artifact polish is not, because polish tracks equipment, time and money far more reliably than it tracks ability.

The term runs as a double diamond with a proposal gate at Week 6. From Week 7 the studio block belongs to your own project.

No required textbook and no required paid software. Anything mandatory in this course works on a free tier. Where a paid tool is genuinely useful for a demonstration, the instructor drives it and the class watches.

• A laptop you can bring to studio. A browser is the floor for everything required; nothing in the course requires an install you cannot undo.
• Somewhere to keep the Project Notebook with automatic version history — a GitHub repository, a Google Doc, or a FigJam page. All three are equally acceptable. Git is not required.
• Basic prototyping materials — paper, card, tape — supplied for the sessions that need them.
• One standing recommended text, not required: Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. One reading per week is posted to Moodle the week before.

How those criteria are evidenced

The marking sheet for every one of these is published in Week 5 — three rubrics, in two versions each (the sheet the instructor marks on, and an identical self-assessment version), plus one checklist and one published statement of the participation bands. Nothing in this course is marked against a standard you have not seen.

The Research Pack and the Project Notebook are checked and banded rather than scored on a criterion matrix: a tick list of what has to be there, then one of four bands — complete and rigorous, complete, partial, not done. The Proposal, the Probe, and the Final Intervention with the Position Paper are scored on criterion rubrics.

Required to pass, ungraded: the Week 6 proposal, the Adjacent-Design checkpoint (W11), an AI Use Statement on every submission, and the Week 12 refusal write, which is returned with comment.

This course meets for 3 hours per week for intensive hands-on discussion and activities. You can also expect to spend a minimum of 3–4 hours outside of class working on assignments or preparing for class. It is my expectation that all students will arrive in class each week fully prepared to engage in our work.

If the outside-class workload is consistently more than that, tell me. That is a problem with the brief, not with you.

Regular attendance and participation are required to succeed in this class. All students are expected to arrive on time and be prepared to engage in the work of this class. It is the responsibility of students to familiarize themselves with any missed material; makeup activities or assignments may not be available.

Frequent lateness or absences will interfere with your learning in this class and may affect your final course grade. Students who miss TWO classes are required to meet with me to discuss how or whether they can pass this class. Students who miss more than 25% (or one quarter) of our class meetings without making prior arrangements with me will fail the class.

Participation in this course is marked against published bands, not against attendance or airtime. The criterion is the institution's own wording: being useful to other people's work. Two instruments carry it — a four-band crit-log record, and a pass/fail weekly write of 150 words responding to a named classmate's work from that session (best 10 of the available sessions) — 15 % and 5 % respectively. Both are published in Week 1, and you receive a written mark plus a paragraph of feedback twice, after Week 6 and after Week 11.

Late assignments can be submitted via Moodle up to two weeks after the assignment due date, incurring a penalty of 5% each business day. Assignments will not be accepted more than two weeks after the assignment deadline and you will be assigned a grade of zero (0).

Live events are treated differently. A missed presentation — the Week 6 proposal or the final presentation — is rescheduled as a one-on-one defence during the assessment period, and the late-work percentage penalty does not apply to it.

The final presentation session is scheduled in the assessment period rather than in Week 14. Its date is confirmed with the Registrar and published in Week 1, so it can be planned around. All coursework, including your final documentation, remains due on the Week 14 class date; only the live presentation moves. Week 14 runs as a full rehearsal of it. If the date creates an unavoidable conflict, the one-on-one defence route above is available on request.

Formal accommodations through Accessibility Services are honoured in full, and you do not need to tell me what they are for.

Beyond those, the following are available on request, with no documentation required and no explanation expected:

• An alternate presentation format — a recorded presentation with live Q&A, or a one-on-one defence — in place of any live presentation. The public session remains the default so that it does not hollow out, but the alternative is real.
• A declared alternative for every hands-on activity. Every session that involves a sensor, library, headset or device names its alternative before the week is planned. If it does not work on your device or your body, take the alternative; it is not a lesser version and it is not marked differently.
• A path through this course without generative AI. See below.

Students are responsible for regularly checking their ECUAD email and our class Moodle site for updates regarding the course. To prevent repetition, all questions related to course content should be posted on our class Moodle site in the General Questions forum. For communications requiring privacy, students can contact me directly via email or attend my office hours. I attempt to respond to emails within 2 business days, but I rarely reply to emails on weekends.

Students are responsible for contributing to an inclusive learning environment free of harassment and discrimination. This includes addressing classmates using their preferred names and pronouns in both face-to-face and online discussions and remembering that not all students have access to the same privileges and experiences. As a gesture of respect to classmates, students are encouraged to participate actively and generously in discussions, critiques, and activities.

Use of phones or other devices can distract both you and your classmates from the work of learning, so we may impose limits on their use during certain activities.

In this course, we will be using the following technologies on a regular basis: Moodle, a modern web browser, and a version-controlled space of your choosing for the Project Notebook (GitHub, Google Docs or FigJam). Individual sessions introduce browser-based tools for gestural input, extended reality, local model inference and design systems; all are free to use and none require an account you must pay for.

Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI or GenAI) is a category of AI systems capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts. These systems include ChatGPT and DALL-E, as well as many others.

Generative AI is named in this course's catalogue learning outcomes, so this studio treats it as material to be examined rather than as a tool to be restricted. Its use is permitted throughout, including in work submitted for grading, subject to disclosure.

Every submission carries a short AI Use Statement recording what you used, what you checked, and — the part that is actually read — what you rejected, either output you turned down or places you chose not to use it at all, and why. Disclosed use is never penalised. Undisclosed use is an academic integrity matter under Policy 4.17.

It remains your responsibility to understand the limitations of these tools and to fact-check and bias-check anything generated with them. In this course that responsibility is concrete: every AI-surfaced claim in your Project Notebook must be traced to a primary source or explicitly marked unverified. An untraced claim presented as fact is treated the same way as an uncited quote.

You may complete this course without using generative AI at all. An equivalent path exists for the Probe and the Research Pack; tell me and we will set it up. The AI Use Statement can be answered completely, and score full marks, by a student who used none.

No detection software will be run on your work, and a detector score will not be treated as evidence. Where there is a question about process, you will be asked to walk through your own decision record, and you may bring someone with you to that conversation.

Protecting your personal information in this course is important. We will be using Moodle as our course site, which is a highly protected online space. At any time that we are sharing information through other online platforms that may be more public, you will be notified of any potential privacy considerations. Any video recordings of our class meetings, presentations or critiques will be shared only via Moodle and will be destroyed at the end of the course.

Work made in this course stays in the room. There are no outside viewers at critiques or presentations. Where the course involves research with people — the interviews in the Research Pack, and the usability session between Weeks 9 and 11 — keep raw recordings and transcripts out of any shared repository and include coded extracts only.

Neither the Sep 30 closure nor the Oct 12 closure falls on a Tuesday, so neither affects this studio. Fourteen Tuesdays fall in the term; one is lost to reading break, giving 13 teaching sessions.

The weekly schedule below is subject to change as the course progresses. Two weeks' notice for any major changes to this schedule or assignment deadlines will be given via email and Moodle. Please consult the course Moodle site for the most up-to-date schedule.