Overview

Interaction design is no longer limited to screens. It shapes how we move through cities, use services, understand systems, make decisions, buy products, learn, travel, communicate, and work. From ATMs and ticket machines to mobile apps, maps, product builders, connected devices, dashboards, and creative tools, interaction design defines the behaviour of the systems around us.

This course approaches interaction design as the design of relationships between people, technology, objects, systems, and context. We will explore how interfaces have evolved from physical tools and early computers into the complex digital products we use today, and how core principles such as affordance, feedback, constraints, mapping, mental models, consistency, personalisation, and motion shape the way people understand and use interactive systems.

The course combines historical references, everyday examples, interface analysis, product critique, case studies, and hands-on design work. Students will learn to look beyond the visual surface of an interface and consider how a system behaves: what it enables, what it prevents, how it responds, how it guides attention, how it handles errors, and how it communicates state, hierarchy, and possibility.

Throughout the course, students will design an interactive product builder: a system that allows users to configure, customise, and manage a product or service. The project requires thinking across customer-facing experiences, administrative tools, desktop and mobile behaviour, interface patterns, motion, feedback, and edge cases. The goal is not only to create something usable, but to understand how interaction decisions shape clarity, trust, rhythm, and meaning.

By the end of the course, students will be able to analyse interactive systems critically, understand the principles behind interface behaviour, prototype interaction models, and design digital products that are thoughtful, usable, and responsive to the people and contexts for which they are created.