Professor Haakon Faste created Spontaneous Design Studio in Fall 2012 in response to a perceived lack of design-oriented elective courses in the Masters in HCI curriculum. While traditional HCI courses tend to focus on targeted topics and areas of existing knowledge, the aim of this course is to build creative confidence, intuition, motivation, empathy, teamwork and fulfillment while working on unconstrained and ambiguous projects. To this end, the course has no syllabus or pre-determined plan. Instead, the first assignment is to design the second assignment and everything else happens spontaneously thereafter.

Some of the projects students have worked on in this course have included: mobile shopping applications, Jack-o-lanterns, philanthropy networks, self-driving cars, talking refrigerators, elegant shoes, life philosophies, and large interactive public displays (specifically: Robowall, the interface you’re looking at right now!)