Interaction Design and Urban Experiences

This studio treats interaction as one subject across digital interfaces and the built environment. A fork in a hallway, a fare gate, a signup form, and a handoff to an automated agent run on the same small set of mechanics: decision points, affordances, feedback, and state. Urban space is where students learn to see them. The digital layer is where students learn to build them.

The first weeks build core skills through fieldwork, drawing, and physical prototyping. From week three, each student selects one urban interaction and carries it through four stages: discovery, definition, development, and validation. Each week’s work becomes the input to the next, and the final project is built from the work already done.

This studio comes from professional interaction design practice. I have hired, taught, and managed interaction designers, run websites, and seen the work evolve from individual tools and pages into products, platforms, SaaS systems, and agents.

The course gives students practical experience reading unfamiliar systems, interpreting how they work, representing interactions clearly, making design decisions, building prototypes, testing them, and revising from evidence. Fieldwork, drawing, mapping, physical prototypes, Figma, HTML and CSS, and other tools give students multiple ways to practice the same core skills across physical and digital systems.

By the end of the term, students will be able to:

• Read interactions across physical and digital settings and describe them precisely, using the terminology, methods, and patterns of interaction design.
• Run qualitative research through direct observation, shadowing, interviews, and analogous experiences, and show how what you found shaped the design.
• Define a design problem with accessibility and exclusion at its center, built on evidence gathered in the field.
• Represent interactions through sketches, storyboards, maps, task flows, journey diagrams, states, wireframes, and prototypes.
• Build and test prototypes at several levels of fidelity, from paper through working digital interfaces.
• Analyze wayfinding, information architecture, and interface behavior, then reconstruct an existing system from that analysis.
• Design the full interaction lifecycle, including failure, recovery, completion, cancellation, and transition.
• Prototype conversational and agent interactions and judge where they belong.

The course runs on a weekly cycle and moves between topics as the work calls for them.

• 01Read the environmentOrientation, navigation, signs, decision points, affordances, field observation. Website launch.
• 02Watch people moveEnvironmental interaction, feedback, constraints, legibility, field studies, presentations.
• 03Draw the interactionSketching, sequence, storyboards, diagrams. Observation, shadowing, analogous experiences. Final project issued.
• 04Make it physicalPaper prototypes, physical models, acting it out, fidelity. Interviewing and moderating a test.
• 05Name what existsInformation, classification, taxonomy, hierarchy, labeling.
• 06Rebuild the structureNavigation, organization, reconstruction, comparative analysis. Problem definition and accessibility. Midterm review.
• 07Map the taskTasks, actions, flows, states, transitions. Journey mapping.
• 08Build the interfaceWireframing, components, patterns, interface behavior.
• 09Make it runDigital prototypes, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript concepts, responsive behavior. Wardley mapping introduction.
• 10Design for failureErrors, interruption, edge cases, accessibility, recovery.
• 11Design the endingCompletion, cancellation, deletion, transition, offboarding. Usability testing.
• 12Shape the conversationPrompt engineering, instructions, context, constraints, conversational interaction.
• 13Design the agentAgents, tools, memory, state, permissions, handoffs, evaluation.
• 14Carry it throughFinal project development, prototyping, testing, critique.
• 15Present the workRevision, final presentations, course website completion.

Readings attach to the topic they illuminate and arrive when that topic does.

• How Artifacts Afford, Jenny L. Davis. Read against wayfinding, affordances, and signifiers.
• Content Everywhere, Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Read against information architecture and content.
• Beyond the Prototype, Douglas Ferguson. Read against physical and digital prototyping.
• Ends, Joe Macleod. Read against endings, offboarding, and failure states.
• The Best Interface Is No Interface, Golden Krishna. Read against prompts, conversation, and agents.
• You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier. Read against the agent experience weeks.
• What Is a Designer, Norman Potter. Read across the whole term as a stance on the work