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Interactive Environments Manual

Reading Material

Claire Rowland et al.: Designing Connected Products: UX for the Consumer Internet of Things
Read it for free online through the website of the TUDelft library (you will have to sign in with your netid).

Simon King et al.: Understanding industrial design: principles for UX and interaction design
Read it for free online through the website of the TUDelft library (you will have to sign in with your netid).

Kathryn McElroyet al.: Prototyping for designers: designing the best digital and physical products
Read it for free online through the website of the TUDelft library (you will have to sign in with your netid).

Bill Buxton: Sketching User Experiences
This is an influential book because it communicated a focus on design for experience to a large community of people in the HCI community (Human Computer Interaction). This community consists mainly of people from technology who were approaching design in a technology driven way: take an (advanced) technology and try to find an application. This book showed them it is important to first look at context and user needs, then take the user experience as a starting point for design. The book further presents a number of techniques and tools that user experience designers can use to arrive at a design solution. This involves the designer to get hands-on in making/realizing sketches (or prototypes) that make their design ideas experiential and hence cause discussion in the design team about the appropriateness of the design directions.

Saul Greenberg et al.: Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook
This is the companion book for Bill Buxtons book entitled Sketching User Experiences. The workbook presents examples for all the techniques and tools in Bill Buxtons book.

Mike Kuniavsky: Ubiquitous Computing Experience Design
This book is interesting because it ties Ubiquitous Computing to Experience Design. Most design literature talks about interactive products on a scale from small wearable/handheld to table-sized products, this book deals with interactive environments where technology is embedded at the scale of a room or a building. Starting with an introduction on Ubiquitous Computing it continues on into introducing Experience Design and gives many references to other relevant publications. It also presents a number of techniques and tools the designer can employ, however for those the books by Bill Buxton and Saul Greenberg provide a better introduction.

Dan Saffer: Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices
This book is a comprehensive introduction into User Centered Design. We use it also in the TU Delft bachelor program. It presents all the steps in a User Centered Design process with some examples. From context analysis and user research, to how to appropriate that data for the design process. To developing design ideas and how to make prototypes to test those ideas.

The Delft Design Guide
The Delft Design Guide presents an overview of product design approaches and methods used in the Bachelor and Master curriculum at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft. It is an excellent resource for all product design practitioners to orient themselves about possible approaches for the design process or for ways to get unstuck if for some reason things are not working out. The introduction chapter contains an instruction on how to use the guide and an overview of all presented topics. No interaction design specific methods yet. However, a great number of topics are more or less also applicable to interaction design.