Last Friday was the last HCI class for 2009 at Penn. The last class is the time for class teams to demonstrate their HCI projects. There were three this year: ParkMe - an iPhone application to show available parking spots in an area, complete with such arcane details as traffic regulations; meMote - a Wii-mote based tv controller that had content based selection and accommodated the elderly and SendMe - a proprietary application that a student did n conjunction with his day job. All three were superb, but ParkMe won the great of the 8's contest. The class is EMTM 608 so hence the awards name.
I used a new book this year, Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions, ISBN: 0-262-13474-8. It provided a perspective on design that nicely complemented the other texts in the course: Don Norman's Design of Everyday things, ISBN: 465067107, a classic that should be read repeatedly; John Maeda's The Laws of Simplicity, ISBN: 0262134721, a book that really like, great for a cross country plane trip and covered in an earlier post and User Interface Design and Evaluation, ISBN: 0120884364 by Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe and Minocha, an excellent, practical textbook on doing HCI. These books, complimented by Ben Schneiderman's, et.al., classic and encyclopedic, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective HCI, ISBN: 0321537351 form a basis for an HCI library.
If you would like to explore my HCI lectures, they will be available for a few more weeks at my homepage. I would appreciate any additional recommendations of books to add to an HCI library, I will suggest a few more in the coming months, but always looking for pointers. Later!
Check out "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel H. Pink. While the books that you are currently using in the course are outstanding, they deal mostly with the "how" and "why," whereas Pink discusses who is going to be leading (designers, artists, poets, storytellers, etc.) in what he refers to as the "conceptual age," an age where quantitative "left brain" thinking becomes more and more commoditized and creative or "right brain" thinking becomes more and more highly valued.
As business and technology managers, it is going to become increasingly important for us to look beyond just the "engineering solution" to the bigger concepts and ideas that can be expressed in medias, languages, and arts that engineers aren't traditionally well versed-in. I think that the challenge is going to be understanding how technology and the humanities can be merged, not just to provide new forms of expression or convenient ways to deliver content, but to provide entirely new aesthetics in addition to superior design and user interfaces.
Posted by: George F. Huhn | April 20, 2009 at 03:02 PM