Interaction Design Lab 2 (Laboratorio di prototipazione di artefatti interattivi) is the second studio course in the Interaction Design stream of the Communication and Multimedia Design graduate programme at IUAV University of Venice. It is conducted in English.
It concerns ambient interaction: interaction in the environment rather on computer and mobile phone screens. Its medium is ‘physical computing’: computing used to control devices or environments which, in some respects, can sense the world and act physically in it. Students learn some basic electronics, in particular how to use the Arduino input/output board. The Arduino’s development environment is based on Processing, the programming language taught in Lab 1.
The students are then given a brief and must make a working prototype of their designs. This year’s brief was to design a Keep-in-Touch: a system of devices which – through sensors, actuators and telecommunications – would allow people to keep in touch with other people, places or information sources in an unconventional way.
After a week of generating ideas, the students formed into design teams. Each team then seven weeks to design and prototype their project before the final public presentation and critique on 20 March 2009.
The eventual projects allowed people to see the weather in their friend’s distant city, for instance; to know when their distant friend is at home or is asleep; to listen, while on the move, to their plants at home; to play music with someone who is on the other side of a broad waterway.
Faculty: Lab 2 was run by Philip Tabor with Gillian Crampton Smith. It included two workshops: on physical computing, ‘Crafting Current‘, by Yaniv Steiner, and on prototyping by Durrell Bishop and Tom Hulbert.