[ pictured: a drawing/design for a boat, and the craft involved ]
Designing interactive experiences requires equal parts techne and disegno.
Techne is the ancient Greek term for any craft handed down from master to pupil. Here we can think of the apprenticeship model of learning a trade or medium.
Disegno is the term used by artists and architects of the Italian Renaissance to refer to the process of planning a painting, mural, or built structure. Disegno has no easy translation in English, because it refers to both the process of drawing, and the process of composing, designing.
This is because the Italians believed that we can only compose through making, through acting, even if its through a drawing or sketch. Alberti wrote that "Drawing does not strive to imitate matter...With the aid of reason and experience it draws out the entire form of the building, independent of any matter." Disegno strives, through analogy or metaphor, to achieve as much presence and reality in the world as the final piece.
In Renaissance Art and in today's Interaction Design, disegno and techne are often separated as labor tasks - the person who designs the thing will likely not end up building the thing. Education in art and design reflects this split - there are some schools and curricula who emphasize solely the tech, how to build the stuff, and others who emphasize only the design and concept, how to imagine the stuff. In a modern Western economy, this is often a distinction of prestige and paygrade.
At Illinois, we're are caught between these worlds - neither as prestigious and wealthy as some, but more privileged than others. So this course's approach to Interaction Design and Art will reflect our middle-class ways. We'll spend one class meeting each week on techne, and the other meeting each week on disegno.
We'll work on Tuesdays in Flagg Hall, our less programmed space. There we'll discuss, look at examples, and work in small groups on a series of design projects that will only be realized in prototype form. We'll cover some of the different methods of research and design involved in Interaction Design, introduce some design concepts and histories. Assignments here will result in four prototyped designs.
On Thursdays we'll work through a series of technical platforms, giving you enough time with each to just barely start learning it. Assignments here will result in some working examples that might not be very interesting to use or look at.