DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Interaction designers bring the possibility of behavior into being through the act of design. To that end, this studio will invite students to take a designer’s posture — confident and curious in the act of research and making. With this posture in mind, the studio will take students through moves…

A sample process blog of the assigned project. Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — What follows is a sample process blog for my module as a guest lecturer in The Perspectives in Design, a UT Austin course instructed by Kate Canales and Gray Garmon. 0. Situate I begin this project by situating my perspective as a designer. I am a white (of Mexican and European +…

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Greetings! Welcome to the wonderful world of interaction design. Below you will find a very abridged list of useful works relevant to the field. Please leave a comment if a favorite work of yours is missing. Other lists of note I’ve cited many works from the following lists/courses, which are also worth a look:

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Storyboarding is an old, well used tool for any kind of visual storytelling. For design, storyboards display important moments in the design concept. The power of the storyboard Storyboards are powerful tools for designers because they “cheaply and efficiently” demonstrate a design concept in use in space, over time. …

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Designing that does not already Future, Fiction, Speculate, Criticize, Provoke, Discourse, Interrogate, Probe, Play, is inadequate designing .— Cameron Tonkinwise [3] Thinking about how we can shape the world with design begins with how we imagine the world. That is, imagination is a force that shapes how we situate ourselves…

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — “Our desire to stay in harmony is so profound that we are, as a result, nudgable, inclined to go with the flow, lest we fall out of sync with our worlds.” — Stephen Neely [2] What we design makes certain ways of living possible . With design, we can nudge…

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Note: Resources for this write-up were heavily sourced from the amazing Hillary Carey. For more, check out her post, Diversifying your Design Syllabus: Recommended Readings by Women, Non-binary, and Culturally Diverse Authors A user is an actor in the way in which they act upon their world. The user is…

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — What follows is a (sample) process blog for students, an inquiry into my everyday practice of making coffee at home. Phase i: observe Nearly every morning, I roll out of bed and, within around an hour or so, I will begin the process of making coffee. A daily ritual for most members of…

DES 304 | School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin | Professor Cathryn Ploehn, MDes — Companion slides can be found here What is (interaction) design? We begin from the place that we, and everyone we know, are already designers, as Victor Papanek argues in his seminal work Design for the Real World: All [people] are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is…