Understanding Product Engineering

Meet Flip, a product-service system to make spending money more tangible.

Designing the interface of a wearable step-counter.

Digital Interfaces

by Aadjan van der Helm

Technology is a hungry beast, fed by more and more products becoming technology enabled and connected over time. The interface of productservice systems is where humans and machines (or technology) meet by interacting. By understanding human-computer interaction, designers can mediate the user experience and find solutions to the challenges of making the interaction meaningful or beautiful.

Interactive product-service systems are found everywhere in daily life. This course provides an understanding of what goes on inside these devices and what it takes to design them. Along with the rise of technology enabled products, our environments are also becoming interactive. Future designers must understand what that means and how to make it possible for technologies embedded in our environment to work together.

Explore the human experience, principles of human motivation and behaviour. Study the dynamic qualities of interaction and giving form to a design. Understand technologies like sensors, actuators and microcontrollers. Discover how programming can orchestrate sensing and feedback for human computer interaction.

Build knowledge through theory and making activities, to shape the behaviour of interactive devices. Apply this in Design Project 2 as you prototype the user experience of a product-service system. And as we look towards technology for solutions to societal challenges, gain an understanding of how designers can craft human and machine collaboration to make the world a better place.

“Interaction can be initiated by humans or by machines. How the interaction unfolds over time will determine how humans attribute meaning to the service the product can deliver. I’m proud to take part in the education that builds confidence in the students in order for them to design beautiful, meaningful product-service interactions in the future.”

Semester 3

Sustainable Impact

In the second year, you develop your first product-service within a system. Following this, you create an innovative design from a sustainability perspective to improve the system. This semester highlights how the pillars of people, organisations, and technology are always connected.

You expand your technical knowledge, allowing you to create more dynamic designs. In addition to this, you learn the important role data plays in the design process, how people learn to look to the future, and how to take aspects of sustainability into account.

You learn about the impact designers can have on the world and how students can make independent choices in the fourth semester.