Experimental Interaction Design – Tallinn Summer School

Non-Degree / Dates: 21 July - 1 August 2025

This is a two-week extensive hands-on course in interaction design. The main goal of the course is to empower people to shape their digital environment thus providing a new level of digital literacy.

The course introduces core design and interaction design topics in a provocative stance, inviting participants to reflect upon ongoing shifts, connections, and re-framings in just about every area of interaction design, and inciting a rebellion against passivity. This is complemented with the development of skills in systematic evaluation of usability and user experience of interaction designs. The expectation is to see participants take ownership of the interaction design process.

The course consists of two weeks. During the first week, the students will work in the groups on a design of the low-fidelity prototypes for wearable devices that could be used for purpose of health and well-being improvement.

In the second week, students move to the hardware lab, where under the guidance of tutors they will implement their projects in forms of the high-fidelity prototypes using Arduino-based controllers Adafruit Flora, Gemma, different sensors, and actuators. The goal of the course is to create fully working wearable prototypes that can be used for evaluation.

During the course, the students will be supported by experts in Interaction Design, Physiology, Physiological Computing, Smart Textile, and Arduino programming engineers.

Why this course?

Upon completion of the course, students will have an understanding of what interaction design is and will grasp the full cycle of the design process including the stages of discovering, defining, developing and delivering concepts targeting areas of their interest.
Students will also develop skills to design, deploy and evaluate prototypes of digital artifacts ranging from simple web-based services and small applications to wearable or physiological computing solutions, and installations.

Teacher(s)

Vladimir Tomberg, PhD, Associate Preofessor of Interaction design and Senior Research Fellow in Tallinn University;

Tanel Toova, an ICT engineer and a system administrator in the School for Digital Technologies at Tallinn University.

Timetable

Classes take place each week from Monday to Friday. The lectures are planned for each day 10:00 – 13:00. After lunch students will have time for group-work on their project in our labs.

As an example, please see also the detailed schedule from previous years.

Participants

This course targets all sorts of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) and non-ICT professionals and higher education students (Master’s, PhD) and provides interaction design understanding and skills to new but highly interested audiences. Examples include, but are not limited to, service providers, communicators, health professionals, educators, architects, designers, artists, and actors.

The course is limited to 20 participants.

Credit points

Upon full participation and completion of course work students will be awarded 4 ECTS points and a diploma of completion.

Course fee

Early-Bird Course Fee (until March 31)	400€
Regular Course Fee (after March 31)	450€

NB! Accommodation, cultural programme and meals are not included in the price.

Scholarships

* The Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and Education and Youth Board offer scholarships to foreign nationals for participation in summer and winter schools in Estonia. Scholarships can be applied by foreign bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD students who have studied in their universities for at least one year (including former study levels). More info and application process details are here.