Spring 2012
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Service Design & Organizational Activation
School of Industrial Design
As the increasingly wired consumer engages with brands on multiple touchpoints, this course applies service design tools to assess, integrate and improve interactions where the form factor, marketing, communication and technology converge to create a memorable experience. We consider both users' needs and business managers' concerns, and we walk through the world with increased sensitivities to the potential for improved understanding between providers and consumers.
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Human-Computer Interaction
School of Interactive Computing
With an emphasis on the cognitive and social aspects of people, this cornerstone class teaches a working knowledge of how to research, conceptualize, implement and test the human-computer interface. Additionally, the course itself is an exercise on establishing a shared vocabulary across the disciplines of psychology, design and computer science in order to creatively and efficiently develop a service, product or experience.
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Digital World & Image Group
School of Literature, Communication, & Culture
Continuing the trajectory of the previous term, we turn our attention to the interplay of digital technology with traditional craft. Renewed interest is placed on the potential for interaction during the period of material construction, rather than just assessing the performative, visual and functional qualities of "finished" works.
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Principles of Interaction Design
School of Literature, Communication, & Culture
Through critique of existing artifacts and by iterating on original projects, we orient ourselves as designers with skills immediately applicable within a broad humanistic framework for assessing emergent technology. Emphasis is placed on oral and written defense of design, conceptualization and realization.
Fall 2011
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Digital World & Image Group
School of Literature, Communication, & Culture
DWIG is a small group of digital media practitioners who make technological interventions into everyday life to provide expressively useful opportunities over functionally practical solutions. Moving beyond HCI as a discipline wedged between the laboratory settings of computer science and psychology, we direct our focus outside to the field where experience and interaction are generative seeds for aesthetic events where people are social actors.
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Research Methods
School of Psychology
A course designed to impart methods of sound research design and evaluation. Topics covered include theories of science, responsible conduct of research, controls, validity and data-gathering techniques. As groups, we acquired practice experience of experimental research groups by crafting proposals, submitting questionnaires and conducing focus groups with a panel of older adults about the usability of popular Web sites. Using qualitative and quantitative data, we authored a report on our findings and provided recommendations for improvement.
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Engineering Psychology
School of Psychology
With an emphasis on collaboration and compromise, we explored various ways to analyze existing human-machine systems, identify areas of inefficiency, and recommend improvements to increase safety, comfort and performance. Assignments required taking a set of high-level system requirements and conducing a user analysis, environmental analysis, task analysis, alternative analysis, and workload analysis. We generated functional flow diagrams, decision/action diagrams, timeline analyses, flow process charts, and operational sequence diagrams. To measure and compute human abilities we explored the area of psychophysics including signal detection theory, methods of detecting absolute and difference thresholds, and charting findings along ROC curves. We left understanding the cost benefits and safety implications of taking a user-centric approach to the systems design process.