IGD - Interaction, Graphics & Design Track

Physical representations of data pre-exist with the invention of the written language. While our contemporary notion of data did not yet exist, early humans externalized their memory by encoding quantitative or qualitative values into physical objects. Over the following millennia, physical data representations allowed people to record, reflect, reason, and decide about the world in new and profound ways. Creating data objects is far from a lost art, and an explosion of new fabrication technologies also introduced an ever-wider array of physical tools to support thinking and communication. We are now in an era where data is an increasingly visible part of our everyday existence, a growing number of artists, designers, makers, and everyday people are actively exploring the possibilities of making data physical. This class will provide the student the occasion to reflect on how data could be encoded and manipulated in physical objects. This class will cover first a short historical introduction, second some snapshots of the practices used by contemporary designers, and some design considerations. The main focus of the class will be to create a physical object to either encode data during a collective action or to represent an existing dataset. This class will be based on the recently published book “Making with Data” (https://makingwithdata.org/).

Quant UX, or Quantitative User Experience (research) is an emerging field with strong industry applications, that applies quantitative methodologies (statistics, data-science) to understand how users interact with digital systems, to find bottlenecks and make better decisions. The increasing integration of a digital layer in all facets of everyday life, from professional to personal, makes it essential to consider how diverse groups of end-users are interacting with digital systems. The majority of digital systems from websites to apps, are registering data on user-interactions which can be analyzed systematically to understand how users interact with an interface, where they encounter bottlenecks, and where there are opportunities for improvement. These include surveys, A/B testing, analysis of data logs, as well as psychophysiological methods like eye-tracking and others. Importantly, the aim of these methods is not stop at analysis, but needs to be linked with actionable insights and innovations.

This course will provide an introduction to key theoretical concepts and methodological approaches of Quant UX. The course will be hands-on. Students will work in small groups to analyse a proposed dataset or one they collect themselves. Different stages of the workflow will be explored each week (UX dimensions, problem definition, data analysis, iteration, testing, insights).

In this course, through a practice-based approach, lectures, step-by-step instructions and exercises, students will learn multiples design and sketching methods. These methods are useful to design, express, refine, present and discuss your (and others’) design ideas about user experiences, service design and application design. This course will help you to build (1) a culture of experience-based design (2) skills to better express your design of a service, a system and application graphically.

In this workshop, students will collectively and intensively explore a research question around the appropriation, uses, symbolics of a real space.. Based on a collaboration with a field of study, they will structure a research question, design the appropriate research methods, apply empirical methods, analyze and present their results. The goal of the course is to experience a short research process from the beginning to the end, to experiment with empirical methods related to human behavior, and to collaborate with (institutional) actors on original fields.

Contemporary projections on possible futures are paradoxical, on one side transhumanism, on the other side collapsology, between the two climate changes. On the one hand, there is an injunction to the energy transition, on the other hand, an injunction to the ecological transition, and between the two, a questioning of their compatibility. How can we study and graphically represent all the scenarios that make up our future projections? This workshop is dedicated to this question and will take place in three parts: 1) theory of visual mapping, 2) conferences on futures, 3) design of a map of possible futures. The theoretical part will be composed of lectures on the principles of graphical data analysis, on temporal data visualization, and a quick overview of data visualization tools. This is followed by a series of lectures by researchers interested in prospecting, speculative design, and analysis of futuristic scenarios. Following these theoretical content, you will be supervised to collectively create a map of possible futures, based on your own cultural or scientific references. This workshop will allow participants to acquire a basic knowledge of graphic data representation methods, and will also provide a space to discuss and debate different prospective scenarios and to design new graphic representations dedicated to this issue.

In this research seminar, scholars and practitioners in Design, Human Factors and HCI are invited to present their late-breaking works, and to discuss with students and labs’ researchers.

The integration of a user-centred reflection at the heart of the approach is a key element for the success of design projects. To improve the relevance and effectiveness of new products and services, it is necessary to take into account the contexts of use, social acceptability and appropriation of new technologies that are at the heart of innovation. This course will aim to familiarize you with different concepts related to the user experience, with design criteria, as well as with different user integration approaches, developed in design ergonomics.

In addition, the course will focus on Design Thinking methods, which distinguish between the "empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test" phases. Different techniques and methods will be presented to you for each phase, which you can experiment on design cases. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of low-tech sketching and prototyping in the ideation and evaluation of design proposals. To take this course, you do not need to be able to draw, but it is highly recommended to think about a problem, or a project to design during the course.

This course first gives an overview of the field of data visualization. It then discusses fundamental principles of human visual perception, focusing on how they help inform the design of visualizations. The following sessions focus on visualization techniques for specific data structures, and discuss them in depth from both design and implementation perspectives, including: multi-variate data, hierarchical structures, networks, time-series, statistical data and geographical data. All exercises are based on Web technologies, including the D3 software library (Data-Driven Documents) and the Vega-lite interactive graphics grammar.