Part I: Responding to Technological and Social Change

New technologies are fundamentally changing the way we learn, work, and play. Technical knowledge and understanding alone are inadequate to deal effectively with many of the implications of new technology. This raises questions concerning both what technology can do and what technology should do. In either case, the products, systems, and services we create with new technology are of little value if we can’t readily understand what they are, what they do and how to use them. From our perspective, one of the keys to addressing the complexity of interaction is a balanced understanding of both the technical (utilitarian and performance) issues and human (social and cultural) considerations [5]. To ensure our solutions to these complex problems do in fact meet design expectations, it will be critical to integrate an active prototype testing and validation process into the design development cycle. We believe this must also be part of the education process (see Figure 1). Figure 1: The course objective is to develop an interactive product, system or service from ‘concept to reality’—prototyping and user validation are critical benchmarks