THE CHALLENGES OF FUNCTIONAL PROTOTYPES: Trans-disciplinary Projects in Interaction Design

Design education has to take into account the increasing complexity of todays products. Design concepts have to be communicated with the help of functional prototypes which simulate the upcoming product as realistic as possible. Co-operation with associated professions like electronics and computer science is inevitable. The interaction design group at the University of Applied Sciences supervises trans- disciplinary projects for more than 7 years now and gained a lot of experiences and insight. In these projects we always work on balancing the analytical or "vertical thinking" of most sciences with the "design thinking" that is focussed horizontally and cares about synthesizing observations from various fields and therefore is by it's nature trans-disciplinary. The master's programme in interaction design is committed to this challenging kind of collaboration.