My daughter recently graduated with a degree in interaction design (part of an industrial design degree program) and we discuss this topic from time to time ... to the best of my knowledge, most schools of architecture have no particular links to -- or knowledge about -- the world of interaction design. My impression is that this form of thinking about design has yet to penetrate the world of architectural education to any meaningful degree.

Since few architects seem to understand what this discipline is all about, I provide this link: So you want to be an Interaction Designer

This link does include the names of some schools that are "forward thinking" about interaction design ... most of these schools do have architecture departments, although I have no idea whether any cross pollination has yet taken place.

I studied MSc "Ergonomics with Human Computer Interaction" (in the Psychology department). The course, as such, does not run any more. The two were not explicitly linked in the teaching syllabus, however, many of the methods of investigating Users and their mental models (expectancies) that come from HCI/Interaction Design are applicable to building design.

Do some googling on Environmental Psychology, wayfinding, mental maps, usability (and its methods). The research is quite dry, though with a bit of thought you can draw out, for the built environment, the useful constructs of proximity, conceptual relation, narrative, cognitive/physical overload/underload, habituation, shortcutting...

It's all in the mind.

Most of all it's about not just empathising with or theorising about your interlocutors, but actual, real-time investigation of how they respond. Structured investigation. People are always more diverse, lazier, and more demanding than the theory.

I plug them quite a lot, but the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London offers courses in Interaction Design

thanks for the info and suggestions.

some of the books i've been reading lately seem to be crying out for more work in the area of interaction design for spaces, and i see it as as an important field as embedded technology gets more and more ubiquitous.

I'm just getting into a class now on interactive objects and spaces, which is focusing on rapid prototyping and testing of our projects using sensors, and a custom authoring program. I'm hoping at some point to bridge the gap with architects/architecture, so that our work is more than "media art," and finds relevancy in real built spaces.

are these books on the list for architects as well as design students? And what do you think of them?

Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough
Shaping things by Bruce Sterling
Else/Where: Mapping... by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall
Everywhere by Adam Greenfield

bump

Usman Haque is top of the interactive pops.

michael a fox at sciarc.

www.mafox.net

not the actor.

thank you thank you

UCLA's Media Design program is one of the leading programs in interaction design. It is a part of the UCLA school of architecture. However, it is nearly impossible to get into.

Go to

http://classes.design.ucla.edu/Winter06/256/

to see project details and work of students in an "interactive environments class taught by reas.

MIT(media lab), NYU, and CMU also do design for interactive spaces and physical computing.

You should be (and probably already are) well aware of the processing initiative and sister projects ecspecially Wiring if you would like to get into designing for interactive environments.

http://processing.org/
[go to link for wiring also under sister projects]

best of luck,

MIT Media Lab, US
NTU Tisch, US
USC, US
SIAT, Simon Fraser University, BC Canada
The Bannf Centre, Canada
RMIT SIAL Melbourne (arch department)
Uni . of Sydeny (arch department)
ICA , London
Interaction Design Ivrea/Domus Academy, Italy
Chalmers University, Sweden

There must be others around in Europe and Asia

NYU :)

I would seek out The Bannf Centre, Canada....cause it is just so beautiful there.

My girlfriend used to be a professor at the Interactive Design Institute Ivrea before it merged with Domus Academy. Apparently the merger was weakened the program (apparently the school was underwritten by Telecom Italia, and the contract expired).

not sure if he teaches at sciarc, maybe... but he did some interesting interactive work, including an installation at sciarc...

check out the videos of "rgb" on that site... its a series of red blue and green lights mounted to the upper windows at sciarc that create a kind of christmas light like patterns through the interior of the building and along the exterior facade... the patterns of the lights are programmable by cell phone... they do some cool work with interactive spaces and monumental facade elements like a video game.

sorry, heres the link: http://electroland.net/flash.php

typo prone

these are all so great.

another artist who's work i like is james clar. his work is with light also.

i'm finding that learning through making is the only way to think through interactive spaces at my early stage of understanding the medium. I just finished an interactive swing with a small team for a class. Although it was a small project, it gained a life of its own that we never would have guessed from the onset of the concept. I'll have some links to video up soon on the blog section of my website: http://people.artcenter.edu/~regier/

... yeah, the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) is all gone in a week from now and is a part of Domus' lesser interaction design program. It's only one year in length. If you're at Art Center, you're a degree removed from IDII--its former chair of the academic program, Andy Davidson, ran the Art Center program before Brenda Laurel did. Anyhow: Casey Reas, one of the Processing creators, was a professor at IDII for its first two years, before he joined the UCLA faculty mentioned above. Hernando Barragan, founder of Wiring, developed the project at Ivrea. Also, Ivrea's faculty had architect Stefano Mirti on faculty for four of its five year-- he is a founder of Cliostraat in Turin, Italy, and did his ph.d. in architecture at the Politecnico Torino. A few students at Ivrea were also architects--you might want to check out Karmen Franinovic.

For straight interaction design, I'd recommend Carnegie-Mellon's interaction design program above any other. But for architecture, do you know about Anthony Burke? He's on UC-Berkeley's faculty and has been doing a lot of urban scale interaction design. Michigan's Malcolm McCullough (author of Digital Ground is also worth checking out. And as far as internships go, you might look into Eric Paulos' Urban Atmospheres project at Berkeley's Intel Research Lab.

Finally: there's the whole ubiquitous computing and locative media community. they're doing some great stuff. The Ubicomp conference organized by UC-Irvine in September 06 is going to be cool and will deal with interactive spaces and cities. And ISEA 2006 will also be great (especially the Interactive City project)... a lot of people mentioned in this thread will be a part of it.

California College of Art

http://www.cca.edu/academics/courses/descriptions/fall/media20801.php

https://www.tudelft.nl/en/educ...

 Wouldn't recommend Hernando Barragan ever,  he made chip that's used for prototyping, even Arduino. Look for best technology Caltech,  MIT ,  professor s of Ivrea Federico Musto had a fake  PhD in  computer science from MIT, a fake  MBA from NYU , Tha scandal broke. This year . The made Hernando Barragan chief design architect he knows nothing about architecture, nor he is a designer.  It's all to pull strings where he lives.