The course looks at an expanding overlap between interaction design, architecture and media arts, to explore how the ideas and methods of interaction design can be applied in larger environments and spaces. The course investigates emerging trends in responsive spaces and installations, environments and interactive architecture, focusing on larger scale experiences, using physical spaces as the arena for interaction. These investigations will look beyond the direct point and click‐style interactions to less direct forms: the environment becomes an eco‐system where people are possibly one, but not the only, active ingredient. Environments and experiences can then be considered as responsive systems, and the interactions can be designed as ephemeral, passive, playful and incidental ‐ rather than deliberate, for a specific purpose and with a specific and predictable result.

Interactive Spaces and Environments is aimed at both design and architecture students, working in cross‐disciplinary collaboration, and aims to foster thinking and designing beyond the material object; to understand the space of sensorial range and effect that modulate in a feedback relation our environment.
The course gives an introduction to the following four fields and how they shape and inform our interaction and spaces:

• LIGHT and SPACE – see for example oslolux.no
• INTERACTIVE SOCIAL SPACES – how do immaterial experiences shape our real spaces?
• INFLATABLES – large scale spatial environments and how to manipulate space.
• AUGMENTED/MIXED REALITIES and MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES and their effect on space and experience.