Intro To Interaction Design — Week 1
Finally! Starting to step into the waters of my major has been something I’ve been looking forward to since I joined CCA. I was really surprised to enter the classroom for the first time and see a room with lots of people, which was very contrary to my first impression of the major last semester.
For the first class we got introduced to each other and our professor, who showed us his great portfolio of interactive work and concepts and guided us through an overview of the class syllabus, as well as the concepts of affordances and signifiers. By the end of class, I was pretty excited about the things i was going to learn, and happy that I chose this subject as my major.
We were given our first bit of homework: To bring materials in order for us to build an “Affordance Cube” in class; starting with a cube, and designing an interactive object that we thought best communicated the following uses:
- Rubbing the cube
- Turning the cube
- Move the cube
- Squeeze the cube
I felt the joy and excitement of this class seep out of my face immediately. Not because the assignment was boring, but because it was an open ended challenge without many guidelines or suggestions besides the use of foam board: I had to find a solution for myself; something I hadn’t really done before. I ended up buying mirror coated paper (because it looked cool) and browsing the local recycled materials store for assorted materials. We were going to spend the following class on building these cubes in class.
I’m not very skilled with my hands, so building this thing in the allotted class time while figuring out how to adapt to the assignment’s directions was frustrating. I thought of a lot of this solutions for this assignment while I was making the cube, so it led to a lot of time being wasted in between.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to finish the cube as fully as I would have liked, and it had a lot of visual problems like the cube having a lot of incorrectly cut faces, and the edges of the mirrored paper stuck on the foam board sticking out. My cube wasn’t the best put together one, and at the end of our time limit I was the first one to be critiqued.
Fortunately, the critique was more focused on the thought process behind the cube rather than it’s execution and the student who was critiquing me wasn’t very negative, so for that I was fortunate.
Well, I guess that’s what happened on my very first week in my Intro To Interaction Design class. Here’s a photo of my affordance cube, I’m not too proud of it but I guess it’s not worst thing in the world either:
