you'll learn ...
- theoretical perspectives on design
- user research methods
- design methods
- visual and interaction design skills
- analytical and empirical methods for evaluating designs
Every week, you should bring ...
- an extra fine red pen.
- a black sketching utensil (pen, pencil, charcoal, or whatever you're comfortable with)
- a sketchbook, white paper, no lines, size is up to you (I recommend 7"x10"), at least 60 pages.
There is no required textbook, but there will be required reading.
project
grading
further reading
project
The centerpiece of the course is a design project that you'll evolve over the course of the quarter. You'll be required to formulate a design problem (ideally from your research interests or some other topic that's personally relevant). What you design could range from an interactive tool, to a service, process, physical artifact, or even a policy.
A significant part of defining your project is scoping it well enough that you can arrive at a fairly complete design by the end of the quarter. That means choosing small problems, since most design problems are deceivingly complex.
We'll use the in-class activities and homework assignments to move your project forward. By week 3, you should have a fairly well defined problem; by week 7 you should have a fairly well designed solution; by finals week, you'll have created several artifacts that communicate the details of your design.grading
Grades are silly. Reducing an individual's knowledge, skills, and performance, all of which are multidimensional and contextual, to a single unchanging number or letter, is an inherently flawed practice. And one of the sole reasons for doing it, to compare students knowledge and abilities, doesn't even work that well, because courses are taught by different teachers in different ways and students learn and perform differently. Grades are more reflective of a students' expectations of themselves than their abilities. You're graduate students: you'll learn because you want to learn, not because you want a certain letter below your name. That, and for the most part, grades don't matter for graduate students. Few people look at particular grades; they're mostly used in the aggregate as a cutoff.
There will be external motivators, however, namely saving face in front of your peers. Expect to seek critique from them and myself, both in and out of class. Also expect to critique your peers' work regularly.
Your grade is based on 100 points, which break down as follows:
Late work is not accepted and activities, labs, and critiques cannot be made up. Remember that you can miss up to 2 activities, 2 labs, and 2 critiques without it affecting your grade.
The 100 points above will be converted to grade points with the following formula:
Activities and readings will be graded on the following 2 point scale of ✓, –, and ✗ (2, 0, and 1 points respectively):
- ✓ means the work surprised me with its breadth or depth of insight. When you get one of these, you've really done something new and enlightening.
- – means the work was adequate. None of it was too surprising, but it didn't fail either.
- ✗ means that you either didn't do the work, didn't finish the work, or really didn't understand the assignment. If it's the latter, you can give me a ✗ for explaining it poorly (but you still should have asked for clarification from me or your peers).
Reading responses should be posted in the reading forum online. Each week I'll post the reading prompt and you can choose to either write a new reply, or comment on another students reply.
further reading
These books cover most of the topics of this course, each from a unique perspective.
For consumers of technology:
A design perspective:
For software designers looking for better ways to design:
Understanding design in engineering cultures:
A nice textbook on HCI methods, models, and theories:
An introduction to methods for practicing designers:
Here are several other readings that cover design aspects of HCI.