This fall, the MFA Interaction Design Department welcomes visiting lectures in an intimate lecture series to inspire conversation, pursue change, and incite creation. 

About the Event

Graphic designers are exposed to the history of their field during art school. Fashion designers remix the historical trends that seem to recur like clockwork. And it's unthinkable that a practicing architect wouldn't understand the historical foundations of their field.

But interaction designers, sadly, rarely have historical perspective because most people working in the field today didn't have formalized training. As a result, we don't know where the principles of how we interact with computers and technology come from. How often are we reinventing the wheel? How often are we ignoring fundamentals?

In this session, we'll try to remedy that. Karen will discuss how human/machine interaction has evolved from buttons and switches to icons and from punch cards and command line interactions to graphical user interfaces and touch technology. Attendees will see videos of early products and systems in action, hear quotes from key thought leaders in the field, and walk away with a better understanding of how our discipline developed before we called it "interaction design."

About the Speaker

Karen plays nicely in the content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design sandboxes. She is Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006, and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish. She also teaches Design Management in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.