Intro to theme: Designing for yourself & reading seminar

Prepare by reading: Neustaedter, C. and Sengers, P. Autobiographical design - what you can learn from designing for yourself. interactions 19, 6 (2012), 28.
http://dl.acm.org.focus.lib.kth.se/citation.cfm?id=2377783.2377791 

This is a fairly recent text from the Interactions Magazine, discussing the issue of designing for and trying out ones own design oneself. Read the text and think out three issues or questions that you would like to discuss with your peers. How does the text relate to what you have read in other courses? How does it relate to e.g. your ideas about what the life as an interaction designer might consists of?

Task of the next two weeks (individual):

In these two weeks you will conduct a really small interaction design project for yourself, making something that you personally would find interesting to test out.

Examples could include (but are not limited to):

• Your own personal cloud service script, e.g. using ifttt:
  https://ifttt.com/wtf
• Following an instructable at instructables.com, for instance to hack an old mp3 player: http://www.instructables.com/id/Super-IPod-1/?ALLSTEPS
• Make a simplistic social application that runs inside Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas/
• An animated game using e.g. Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
• Develop a really simple personal mobile app:
  http://gigaom.com/2012/03/05/with-this-tool-even-you-can-write-android-apps/
  http://www.raywenderlich.com/1797/how-to-create-a-simple-iphone-app-tutorial-part-1
  http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/processing-android-mobile-app-development-made-very-easy
  http://www.androidhive.info/2012/03/android-building-audio-player-tutorial/

• Borrow a kit from Ylva - arduino, makey makey, pico cricket (first come first served) to make something physical. E.g. a toy for your cat...?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKJK082Cn3A

The design can be really tiny and simplistic, the important thing is that you manage to get it to a stage that you can test out for yourself -- and that you have fun in the process.