CS 6724: Designing with Artifacts

Scott McCrickard, Computer Science
mccricks@cs.vt.edu

This special topics course will delve into the artifacts used to
inspire the design of user interfaces.  Participants will seek to
understand how the artifacts are useful in a technical and
human-centric design environment.  Many of the sessions of this
class will be very hands-on, as class participants will conduct
design sessions using the artifact collections.  These sessions
will be balanced with readings, discussion, and analysis--toward
identifying whether and how the artifact collections and associated
design methods lead to creative endeavors, positive individual and
group experiences, collaborative teamwork, and effective designs.

In addition to the in-class design sessions and discussion,
participants will undertake an interface design project in an area
of their choosing, leveraging the artifact-based methods and
techniques introduced in the class.  It is expected that the
participant projects will produce a publication-quality paper. 
In addition, it is expected that all class participants will
contribute to a methods analysis paper to be submitted to the
DIS 2010 conference.


Grading
- class participation
- in-class presentations (leadership of design activities)
- 6 short writings throughout the semester
- end-of-semester design project and paper


Artifact collections that may be used include:
- von Oech's Creative Whack Pack and Ball of Whacks
- Michalko's ThinkPak
- Zwicky's Morphological Analysis
- Beyer & Holtzblatt's Affinity Diagramming
- Friedman's Envisioning Cards
- IDEO's Method Cards
- Branham's PIC-UP card set


Selected papers that may be covered include:
John M. Carroll, Wendy A. Kellogg
Artifact as theory-nexus: hermeneutics meets theory-based design.
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '89).
Pages 7-14.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/67449.67452

Oscar De Bruijn, Robert Spence
A New Framework for Theory-Based Interaction Design Applied to Serendipitous Information Retrieval.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI).
Volume 15, Issue 1 (May 2008)
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1352782.1352787

Steve Harrison, Maribeth Back, Deborah Tatar
"It's Just a Method!" A Pedagogical Experiment in Interdisciplinary Design.
In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '06).
Pages 261-270
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1142405.1142445

David G. Hendry and Batya Friedman
Theories and Practice of Design for Information Systems.
In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '06).
Pages 435-444.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1394445.1394492

Donald E. Rickert, Thomas Nagy
Viewpoint: focus groups, theory or the kid in the garage?
Communications of the ACM 42, 3
Mar. 1999
Pages 34-36
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/295685.295693 

Eric L. Santanen, Robert O. Briggs, Gert-Jan de Vreede
Causal Relationships in Creative Problem Solving: Comparing Facilitation Interventions for Ideation
Journal of Management Information Systems
Volume 20, Issue 4 (Spring 2004)
Pages 167-198  

Donald A. Schon.
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.
Basic Books: New York (1983).

Alan. L. Tharp
Innovating: the importance of right brain skills for computer science graduates.
In Proceedings of the 12th Annual SIGCSE Conference on innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE '07)
Pages 126-130 (2007)
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1268784.1268823 

Shahtab Wahid, Stacy Branham, Lauren Cairco, D. Scott McCrickard, Steve Harrison
Picking Up Artifacts: Storyboarding as a Gateway to Reuse.
In Proceedings of the IFIP TC.13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT '09)
August 2009