Interface design

won’t be coding unless it’s what you really want to do

teams with ppl of diff strengths

what ppl do when confronted with information

halfway through the quarter switch from seminar format to group team work

her class at uc Irvine in November she went trolling for advice

they have one of the best programs in the country

garnet hertz is a professor visiting who is awesome

she talked about her course

he’s visiting week 5

walking through the syllabus

what design contributions are

what makes for a good experience/interface

 

 

Learnit portal takes you to Lynda.com

 

HCI is a great book. she has a project she wants to do with this model

what influenced your practice and design? little essays

you will write a similar piece yourself on one of the ppl. choose it, read it, and write up your impressions on it

here’s what’s innovative and floats to the top.

famous names in HCI writing abt other famous names in HCI

quick tutoring on why some of these things are important in HCI

 

Katz, J. (2012).

Designing Information: Human Factos and Common Sense in Information Design

look for an information resource and analyze whether it works or not

 

begins on the nature of information. information design and visualization of info

 

V.

Kaptelinin and M. Czerwinski

Beyond the Desktop Metaphor

 

Xerox Alto – coined the desktop metaphor

allowed direct manipulation of data or information objects

recently mobile interfaces don’t have the desktop metaphor. no mouse, touchscreen stuff. very elaborate

last few weeks, developing ideas abt existing interfaces that attempt to go beyond the desktop metaphor

chapters written by some of the top names in HCI

 

sketchbook

choose a resource of one kind

what is this space/resource telling you from this point?

information-seek behavior class, she sends ppl to the supermarket and analyze its organization

 

 

Urban Sketchers groups around the world urbansketchers.org

 

Open Uniersity sketching tutorials are wonderful

simple techniques of design

(share this with storm!)

designed for engineers to start thinking about how to sketch

getting control of the pen

contribute once a week

if an info resource works well, why?

can share images of your sketchbook if you want, along with description

collage is good

post-it notes are really in the spirit of sketching

MT: storyboarding, magazine layout

 

summary of key work in HCI

Week 5 due

1500 words

get a copy of the material/piece. pick one, read through it, write up a piece. audience is the rest of the class. these will be posted on the wiki

can choose from the list of ppl, too

 

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum – she has it checked out

MT: like a virtual lit review, each of us does an abstract and posts on the wiki

 

two workshops and a design charette

 

TKTK is still a top thinker in AI, HCI

for workshop idea of critical technical practice is still hugely influential

this is the day the Garnet Hertz is visiting

 

What is a Charette?

A Charette is an intense effort to solve any architectural or design problem within a limited time. From a creative standpoint, a Charette can be divided into three portions:

1. Listen. Listen to what the financial backers, owners, and other stakeholders have to suggest. Work together with them to come to an understanding about the project, what their goals and limitations are, and how these might fit with your ideas.

2. Envision. Imagine together all of these various considerations to come up with a realistic and creative proposal which will be interesting while at the same time financially, responsibly, and otherwise feasible.

3. Draw fast! The ability to work with creative team who can bring ideas to a tangible design sketch quickly, allows for instant communication.

A little history

The term "Charette" (little cart) appeared in the late 1800's. Architecture students at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris who needed to rush their designs to their instructors, placed their drawings on a cart which was called a charette. Later the word broadened in meaning and came to describe any intense, short-term design project. Today the word is used by the architectural and design community at large to describe any intense, on-the-spot design effort.

— From Masterplanning.com

 

Critical Making Garnet Hertz – really cool little booklets

 

last two weeks – design teams working on the desktop metaphor charette

brainstorming ideas and sharing with the group, coming up with team proposals for new designs

 

feb 19 and 26

on e will focus on information design & visualization. the other on personas or TKTK. you can choose which one of the latter pair.

 

 

MT: maybe I could look at flow (people, air, cars, animals, etc.) in different spaces and then use my weird squigglies to illustrate them. another idea is showing depth by cutting through pages. or something about organizing or categorizing everything in a space

 

 

we have to render sthg on what we tend to collect. MT: fortunes? shoes?

Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized: documentaries on design part of a trilogy

 

HCI versus user experience

user exp has evolved out of HCI

much more specialized field focuses on the user’s whole environment

HCI is going that way, anyway

 

Kolko piece on page 5 has the definitions

 

MT: information management as informed by HCI within businesses

MT: how much far-sighted thinking goes on when things are being designed? future use

 

 

What has happened in HCI over time

fluctuation, different disciplines contributing to the industry

sense of legitimacy with hard science, rather than soft

cognitive psych orientation early in the field

shift toward the soft methods

Carroll Plans in Situated Actions as pivit point in rethinking the way to study HCI

 

participatory design conferences

she looked at how ppl use a Xerox machine

rational, goal-directed plans specified up front don’t reflect how people actually do things

we shouldn’t be designing things as thought here are rules preordained stuff

 

 

Shifts

expertànon-expert

fluid debate among disciplines

hardà soft science

population of users changing

futurology/imagined futures

uneven resource allocation: “the future is here, it’s just uneven”

geography/space vs. virtuality (virtual world is still very much connected to the physical world.)

ubiquitous computing all of the physicality matters. not disembodied personas floating around

non-discretionaryàdiscretionary computing

• non-discretionary has to do with corporate research; non-elective computer use
• the people who did the computing, computing was the job
• discretionary—people can choose what they will use. design adapts to the human/behavior
• MT: the strip of commands to put above the function keys when the mouse came out
• tracy kidder the soul of a new machine. about the development of the skunkworks of a new workstation. he lived with the engineers for a year to figure out the life of those ppl
• we start w HCI in a period when the ppl who are doing the computing are the ones who build them. we expect human users to adapt to the machine. task was getting the humans to get on board and adapt themselves. basic information retrieval literature early work was trying to get the human to fit the machine.
• at the time of englebart (1968)
• the actual physical way to do the computing was a focus of intensive research
• now it’s software
• trackpads have a whole repertoire
• this demo is a watershed for the idea that we can make things simpler’
• it did inspire the ppl at Xerox for the Alto
• Xerox pumped a lot of money into the Rochester phd program so they all had Altos to play around with
• notion of computing begins to move into everyday life. the whole notion of who you’re designing for has to change
• other ways to think abt this:
• non-discretionary
• institutional
• human factors
• utility
• system-centered
• imposed
• task
• compliance
• transmission
• repository
• work
• supply-side
• discretionary
• personal
• human actors
• usability
• user-centered
• voluntary
• relational
• agency
• meaning
• festival
• leisure, play
• demand-side
• some work being done to move workàdiscretionary
• MT: creative/innovation culture in business
• still imposed
• more flexibility in how to do your work, but then bizs pull in the reigns
• resource determines whether the workplace has flexibility in culture
• resource dependency – depends on what you have (like in education) ‘to work with but there’s also the effort to create dependencies. path-driven dependencies (walled garden) apple used to be open, now they’ve closed down with that to create dependence (MT: high switching costs)
• we’re going backward into a media production and consumption mode which sets aside many of the strengths that make computing a mode of exression or creativity
• move toward having all of our stuff/files personally to having everything elsewhere
• tablets, etc. are consumption machines, not production machines (MT: apps are changing that – we can print, draw, etc.)
• these machines were bhuilt to be reconfigured, while tv was not built to be messed with. very threatening to supply side

John Carroll

in some respects, reiterates Grudin, but the fact that he’s responding to a talk after 20 years, he has come so far over to the social science, embeddedness that we take for granted in dourish’s work

he finally comes down to

craft models versus science

build it and they will come versus research abt how ppl work

they set up a strong man argument – preferred mode that hci should follow we’ve never seen it

he’s talking ab the notion of what knowledge TKTK

why look down on the craft ontology?

science is abt prediction and control to find generaliable knowledge so we can predict and control the next time we see these circumstances. prediction and explanation

shift toward an anthropological, situated worldview

this article is really interesting to leah because he shifts over time to this way of thinking

trial and error is a legitimate mode of knowing. for it to work, be ontologically sound, for ppl to agree that it works and for ppl to TKTKTK

contrasts grudin article because he’s explicitly bringing out a fight between kinds of knowledge

fig leaf of legitimacy

 

What are the vision abt computing that they’re talking about? Bell, Dourish, other recommended readings

the domain of the computer is that of science/data and the arts will never be in the computer realm

[Mark Hanson – data-driven art]

the idea of quantification so closely associated with computation, so computing was about computation

Bush – links and trails

Xanadu is all abt visualizing links and trails

taskàrelational there is also this other notion of relationships embedded in the network idea

personal navigation through links and trails

menu driven interfaces was new in the englebart demo

telephone and telegraph is networked, not menu hierarchy

the introduction of switching is the important part to get the idea of what the relations should be

universal decimal system are ways to try to handle glut of information abstract presecification of categories we believe we can predict so the nect thing we come across will be placed

 

LickLider

decision support

man and machine cooperation

how will I know that I’ve made a good decision? how will I know that I’ve made best use of the information in making my decision

rule-based decisionmaking

routinizedàdatabase and decision rules

what goes into the making of choices

nelson – four conceptions of a omputer

 

they are imagining what and who computers are for

what the computer can and can’t do for you

we’re pushing more toward the computer—gathering more from us than we are gathering from them

do we rust google to anonymize

bracelet thing coming to Disneyland

 

 

next few weeks of readings

 

 

can choose one of the classics or choose one of these people and get into what their big headline items/contribution was in the style of HCI remixed

go for that