in Teaching

What is Interaction?

A seminar at Köln International School of Design trying to develop a collective understanding of interaction.

Fundamental changes call for fundamental questions. As interaction (sometimes disguised as “experience”) has crept from large-scale military facilities into our pockets, and from computer science into the center of the design field, we will take a break and ask what it actually is.

In the seminar we will thus examine the nature of interaction, its historic origins, alternative histories, and possible futures. We will discuss the role of the computer and non-computational materiality for interaction, the relationship of perception and action at the interface, the politics and cultures of interactivity, and the apparent dissolution of interaction into a post-digital reality in which every problem can be turned into an app.

The results of the seminar will be collected in printed “Transactions on Interaction.”

Winter term 2018/2019.