10-15 Week Self-Taught Interaction Design Course

For the next 10-15 weeks the content of my blog is going to be associated to my reading of the text book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. This book was written by three British ladies, Sharp, Rogers and Preece, and published on Willey. Here is a link to their website, which is somewhat underwhelming considering the depth of the book. This is not to say that other topics may not occasionally pop up - the will be the exception rather than the rule.

For the past five months my personal curriculum has focused on reading and applying the theoretical knowledge and perspectives in my everyday experience with interactive devices and services. Moving forward I want to take a more structured approach to exploring interaction design before I delve into experimentation with design itself (those who would rather just dive in head first into the practice of design itself may think this sounds like looking at a porno magazine - albeit a good one - in substitution for the real thing).

So for the next few months my posts are going to feature my "homework". I will be sharing the assignments that I will be completing from the end of each chapter in the text book. Here is an overview of what the book covers (of course, I will likely focus on some areas and assignments, while glossing over others - one of the main benefit of following your own curriculum):

1. What is Interaction Design?
2. Understanding and Conceptualizing Interaction
3. Understading Users
4. Designing for Collaboration and Communication
5. Affective Aspects
6. Interfaces and Interactions
7. Data Gathering
8. Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Presentation
9. The Process of Interaction Design
10. Identifying Needs and Establishing Requirements
11. Design, Prototype, and Construction
12. Introducing Evaluation
13. An Evaluation Framework
14. Usability Testing and Field Studies
15. Analytical Evaluation