Derek Chan

Almost one week after classes officially began, I can proudly say that I’m a grad student.  No, it’s beyond just saying I’ll be attending grad school as part of the inaugural class in SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design.  It kind of hit home last Tuesday on our first day of class when our first assignment was issued.  It’s not all fun and games anymore, I thought.  We really have to start working.  And that we have, as the onslaught that is first semester of grad school came knocking on my door.

Despite the piles of work we have to go through, the classes themselves have been very rewarding.  Tuesday’s class, History of Interaction Design, taught by Karen McGrane, wrapped a contextual framework around who we are as interaction designers and how we got here.  The course is designed to tell the story of the pioneers in our field who were never considered interaction designers at all.  The people who helped shape our discipline came from other backgrounds in HCI, computer science, engineering, physiotherapy, human factors, and so on.  Over the course of five weeks, we’ll be learning about these people, the technologies involved, and the interplay between them that gave birth to the notion that technology ought to conform to human behavior, and not the other way around.

Wednesday was a full day of classes.  First was the class I was originally worried about – Physical Computing.  From someone who has never taken an engineering or computer science class, this was pretty intimidating to read about on paper.  But as class went on, instructor Rob Faludi eased us into the material and by the end of it, I was actually pretty stoked about soldering some wires together to a switch. :)

Later that evening, the first of the program’s fall lecture series took place, and we were lucky enough to have Cooper’s Kim Goodwin talk to us about her perspectives of interaction design.  I was greatly inspired by Kim after hearing her speak at Interaction09 in Vancouver last February.  Her vision of sustaining our craft, through education and mentoring, helped re-affirm my decision to apply to this program.

On Thursday, we started Jason Santa Maria’s class, Communicating Design.  We ran through the usual course syllabus stuff and once that was through he assigned the class their first task – tell a story of how you got here (with some emphasis on type treatment).  We were given one and a half hours to do this in any way we could.  The class scrambled off and when time was up, we all gathered to take a look at everyone’s work.  We were treated to seeing everyone’s work and the unique styles and approaches, as well as the diversity in interpretation of what the assigned story meant to us.  Some pieces had a fairly unique styling to them, and if we knew even a little about the people in our class, we’d know who it belonged to.  Kristin’s information visualization, Gene’s wave of coffee graph, and Colleen’s neat little booklet come to mind.  Others were more obscure and invited exploration and interpretation, such as Carmen’s amalgamation of quotes and Jeff’s series of empty parking lot photographs.

We still have two more classes to go so stay tuned for more interpretations of semester one at SVA.