Mozilla Labs are supporting 15 students from Bauhaus University are participating in the ‘Designing for Action’ course in the Media Art and Design BFA program.
The course, conducted by Jan Dittrich under the supervision of Prof. Jens Geelhaar – enables students to create applications and products focused on user needs. Students from various backgrounds have joined the course – media art & design, computer science students and even an architecture student.
Course outline
The students are initially introduced to the basics of interaction. The class then aims to deal with design for and with free projects – so in later sessions the students are introduced to possibilities and problems of open source design.
Teams of two to four students were formed in order to realise the project brief. Students could choose from two possible topics:
- easily (re)finding valuable pages – done by bookmarks today
- connecting information with other services – experimented previously with Ubiquity
Taking it forward
Conceptual and individual experiences will be gained by visiting the accompanying design project which consists of phases with outputs along the way.
Students will need to plan user research, to get to know about the users goals and current problems, create designs based on that findings and test their designs using prototypes. The students designs and ideas will be fully documented in the open.
Keep keep track of the students progress on the classes page of the faculty or follow along with the lecture notes which are freely available.
Mozilla involvement
As part of their Student Outreach channel the Mozilla Labs Concept Series team are fully supporting this endeavor of ‘Open Design’ – looking at ways to expose, highlight and mentor the students outputs.
Jan will keep communication with the Mozilla Labs team going as the class progresses. Review sessions will be conducted and feedback given by both Mozilla staff members and industry professionals aiding in the refinement of the proposed concepts.
Watch this space for further blog posts publishing the concepts for your feedback!