(February 6, 2009) Bjoern Hartmann, of the Stanford HCI Group, gives an overview of different prototyping tools he has built with collaborators to address two research questions. First, how can tools enable a wider range of designers to create functional prototypes of ubiquitous computing interfaces? Second, how can design tools support the larger process of learning from these prototypes?
October 5, 2007 lecture by Ron Yeh for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Pen and paper are powerful tools for visualizing designs, penning music, and communicating through art and written language. This pairing provides many benefits -it is mobile, flexible, and robust. Ron discusses the impact that this will have on end users and the software developers who will have to create these applications.
October 12, 2007 lecture by Paul Dourish for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Mobility is no longer sufficient; location-tracking is a key feature. However, the introduction of location-based technologies has traditionally been accompanied by a series of concerns over privacy. These discussions, though, adopt a fairly reductive model of privacy, concerned primarily with the trade-offs involved in service provision and location disclosure.
October 19, 2007 lecture by Ed Chi for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Augmented Social Cognition is trying to understand the enhancement of a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason. This has been taking in the form of many Web 2.0 systems like social networking sites, social tagging systems, blogs, and Wikis.
October 26, 2007 lecture by Paul Tang for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Even more fragmented than American health care is the management of health care information. Faced with a barrage of poorly organized health information, physicians and other clinicians must sift through uninspired displays to glean pearls of information necessary to make clinical decisions. New tools for information gathering from patients and for information rendering to patients must be developed in order to activate patients to become fully informed and fully empowered members of their health care team.
November 2, 2007 lecture by Cathy Marshall for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Most of us engage in magical thinking when it comes to the long term fate of our digital stuff. At this point, a strategy that hinges on benign neglect and lots of copies seems to be the best we can hope for. Cathy discusses four central themes of personal digital archiving and some additional challenges introduced by home computing environments. She also talks about how these themes relate to emerging institutional archiving technologies, best practices, and information policies.
November 9, 2007 lecture by Monty Hamontree for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. This talk delves into 5 interrelated keys that Microsoft teams focus on to elevate the impact of "design research". Namely how to: team insightfully as project teams; observe our users holistically; broker user and design patterns proudly; distill fresh insights collectively; and envision design essence vividly. A model of various design research modeling approaches is used to spur discussion around the strengths and weakness of each approach.
November 16, 2007 lecture by Ge Wang for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. In the first part of this talk, Ge presents the design, philosophy, and development of ChucK, a computer music programming language intending to provide a different approach, expressiveness, and thinking with respect to time and parallelism in audio programming - as well as a platform for precise and rapid experimentation. In the second part of this presentation, Ge describes his adventures with the "laptop orchestra": a new type of large-scale, computer-mediated music ensemble.
November 30, 2007 lecture by Ted Selker for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547). This talk demonstrates that Artificial intelligence can competently improve human interaction with systems and even each other in a myriad of natural scenarios.
December 7, 2007 lecture by Brian Lee for the Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547). Today's designers generate content both on paper and online. Designers spread their work over physical and digital media, each of which has powerful, but distinct, sets of affordances. Recent work suggests that augmented paper interfaces can marry the ubiquity of paper interactions with the ease of search, annotation, and presentation afforded by digital representation. This dissertation examines novel ways to support and augment the practice of design through sharing and reappropriation of digitally captured design content.
April 4, 2008 lecture by Beth Noveck for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). In this lecture, Beth Noveck discusses why current political institutions have changed little in response to Web 2.0. She explores the role of visual and social interfaces in producing better democracy and talk about the progress of the Peer-to-Patent project. Overall, the talk focuses on how both law and technology might be better deployed together to bring about not only deliberation but collective action and a new kind of collaborative democracy that connects institutions to networks.
April 11, 2008 lecture by Gwendolyn Floyd and Joshua Kauffman for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). This lecture shares REGIONAL's recent in-field Cuban research that spans the socio-technological, the political, and the top-secret. It reveals how their research led to the design of a simple and affordable digital device that would potentially accelerate Cuban social change. It also discusses how an understanding of Cuba's development in a technologically walled garden offers us the chance to consider this closed-system metaphor for how the world is increasingly accepting itself to be.
April 18, 2008 lecture by Steve Whittaker for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). Steve Whittaker reviews the Digital Memories vision, briefly present various studies that challenge that vision, moving on to suggest an alternative approach to the topic that is informed by cognitive science, suggesting that instead of focusing on exhaustive capture we should be designing prosthetic memory devices that are (a) synergistic with our organic memories (b) have mechanisms for selecting and
April 25, 2008 lecture by Leah Buechley for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). Computational textile researchers weave, solder and sew electronics into cloth to build soft, flexible and wearable computers. Computational textiles or "e-textiles" is a young discipline, and developments in the field have so far been relegated almost exclusively to research labs in industry and academia. Lisa Buechley presents advancements that make the designing and building of e- textiles accessible to new audiences, describing developments in engineering, design and applications that are helping to democratize creative ubiquitous computing.
May 2, 2008 lecture by Krzysztof Gajos for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). User Interfaces delivered with today's software are usually created in a one-size-fits-all manner, making implicit assumptions about the needs, abilities, and preferences of the "average user" and the characteristics of the "average device." Krzysztof Gajos argues that personalized user interfaces, which are adapted to a persons devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities, can improve user satisfaction and performance.
May 9, 2008 lecture by Dan Morris for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). MySong is a system that automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody. A user with no musical experience can create a song with instrumental accompaniment just by singing into a microphone, and can experiment with different styles and chord patterns using interactions designed to be intuitive to non-musicians. Dan Morris describes how MySong works, discusses results from a recent usability study, and shows lots of audio examples to demonstrate that non-musicians are in fact able to use this system as a powerful creative tool.
May 16, 2008 lecture by Rob Miller for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). Rob Miller discusses some of the explorations into keyword programming in the web automation domain, and also in other domains such as Java development. One surprising result is that programming language syntax often has relatively little information content, and can be inferred automatically from only a handful of keywords - allowing us to design programming systems that reduce the learning and complexity burdens on their users.
May 23, 2008 lecture by Ben Shneiderman for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). Science 2.0 focuses on the human-designed world in which the dynamics of trust, privacy, responsibility, and empathy are determinants of success. Advancing Science 2.0 will require a shift in priorities to promote intense collaboration, integrative thinking, teamwork-based education/training, and case study ethnographic research methods. Ben Shneiderman lays out an ambitious vision that will impact research funding, educational practices, and democratic principles.
May 30, 2008 lecture by Hiroshi Ishii for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS547). Tangible Bits seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Their goal is to invent new design media for artistic expression as well as for scientific analysis, taking advantage of the richness of human senses and skills - as developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world - as well as the computational reflection enabled by real-time sensing and digital feedback.
(January 9, 2009) Todd C. Mowry, prefessor at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about the joint research venture between Carnegie Mellon and Intel Research, called "claytronics". In this talk, he describes the technical process that they have made so far, as well as suggesting what this technology might enable.
(January 16, 2009) Hayes Raffle of Nokia Research presents the Topobo system, a class of tools that helps people transition from simple but intuitive exploration to abstract and flexible exploration. Children use Topobo to transitiion from hands-on knowledge to theories that can be tested and reformulated, employing a combination of enactive, iconic and symbolic representation of ideas.
(January 23, 2009) Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio, covers the basics of touchscreen and gestural technology including: ergonomics, a brief history, prototyping and documenting, and how to communicate the presence of a gestural interface to users.
(January 30, 2009) Bobby Fishkin, CEO and Co-Founder of Reframe It Inc., looks at how certain interface innovations can allow time shifting in the interpretation of scholarly texts and online content and how these same interface innovations have a long history among great thinkers and ordinary readers who have placed texts of centrality into their social context through contextual use of marginalia.
(February 6, 2009) Bjoern Hartmann, of the Stanford HCI Group, gives an overview of different prototyping tools he has built with collaborators to address two research questions. First, how can tools enable a wider range of designers to create functional prototypes of ubiquitous computing interfaces? Second, how can design tools support the larger process of learning from these prototypes?
(February 13, 2009) Vladlen Koltun, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, talks about recent research in virtual worlds and attempts to alleviate the difficulties faced within this field.
(February 20, 2009) Michal Migurski and Tom Carden, both of Stamen Design, discuss the online maps their studio has put out, originating from Oakland Crimespotting. They present an overview of the project and its effect on our work, our thoughts on open source mapping code and wiki-style community maps.