Programming Users - Projektwoche @HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd

Nowadays, designers work predominantly with software. User interfaces, as powerful tools, enable many different ways of working and make the computer usable for laymen. At the same time these interfaces reduce the user's options to the selection and application of predefined functions. The designing is therefore already limited in each step to a pre-selection of possible procedures. This phenomenon is interesting for designers in two respects: we design with such software products, but we also design new interfaces. During the lab week we developed a new perspective on the user interface and its deterministic nature. For this purpose we created small projects with the Python framework 'PyAutoGUI'. This framework allows to program and automate user input, which is normally done by mouse movements and keystrokes. During the project week the students created many different experiments, from the automated arrangement of graphics in the “mac OS Finder” to generative design in “MS Paint”.