ICS 105: Project in Human-Computer Interaction

At-a-Glance

Instructor: Paul Dourish (jpd at ics dot uci dot edu)
TA: Judy Chen (judychen at uci dot edu)
Lectures: Tu Th 11:00-12:20, ELH 110
Discussions: Fr 1:00-1:50, ICF 101

Syllabus: see here.

Introduction

This project class is designed to give you practical experience in prototyping, designing and evaluating user interfaces. User interface design is more than simply buttons and slides; it's about the entire design of a system that allows people to make use of it. As more and more devices and objects that we deal with have computer technology embedded in them, the problems of designing good models for interaction becomes increasingly important.

I will be strictly enforcing the ICS 104 prerequisite; I assume that you all understand how to evaluate interfaces according to cognitive princples as laid out in that class. That's material we'll draw upon and that you'll need to know; however, this is a project class and we'll mainly be focussed on building software systems.

I like to teach ICS 105 based around a unifying theme for the various projects we'll work on. This year's theme is location-based systems. We will give each team a USB GPS receiver, and some code to read the GPS data in your application. The syllabus discusses some project ideas; here are some links to give you some inspiration:

• Active Campus
• Sonic City
• PacManhatten
• Can You See Me Now?
• Location-aware To-Do Lists
• GPS Drawing

Announcements

Sat Apr 2: Web page and syllabus posted.

Thu Apr 14: Here's a bunch of pointers to GPS drivers and software.

Lecture Notes, Handouts, and Readings