alexis hope

This quarter I am taking three awesome courses.

Two of them (Information Visualization and Information Design) are all about DATA. For the former, I’ll be working with a team to build an interactive visualization tool for the awesome Living Voter’s Guide project, and for the latter, I’ll be making a set of static infographics using various data sets about space. There is some overlap between the two classes, but one is more focused on visualizing large data sets and understanding human cognitive abilities, and the other is much more focused on layout and design. 

I am also taking a Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) course, which covers the history of CMC and various other research topics we chose as a class (social media & political participation, privacy & identity). So far, class activities have included unearthing and examining 15-year-old WIRED magazines, playing around with LambdaMOO, and talking about World of Warcraft. I’ve really been enjoying the historical aspects of this class—history really doesn’t get enough play in conversations about technology design!

I’m pretty into New Year’s resolutions and goals. In honor of 2012, my lovely roommate Angela Buck and I went out for coffee and talked about our intentions for the new year.

Here’s what I came up with, in no particular order:

• Become a badass web programmer
• Record an EP (myself singing and guitar, Angela on drums, and perhaps miss Alexi Curelop on bass). We will follow these awesome instructions.
• Go to Japan with Cory Schmitz
• Make a cool star projector with the help of my Hackademia buds and Metrix Create:Space. 

There are more I could list, but in the interest of allowing for some spontaneity in the coming year, I’ll stop here!

This quarter I taught HCDE 418: User Experience Design, a project-based course that serves as my department’s introduction to behavioral research and human-centered design methods. Yesterday was the last class of the quarter and my students gave presentations on all of the work they have done over the past ten weeks. And it was a lot of work: in teams of four, the students interviewed potential users, conducted additional kinds of inquiry (secondary research, diary studies, behavioral observation, etc.), came up with a bunch of designs, did a competitive analysis on existing products and services, narrowed down their ideas to create a prototype, and evaluated their prototype to uncover usability problems. I’m exhausted just writing about all of the work they did!

The teams came up with a pretty diverse array of ideas and prototypes, including: a tablet-based recipe scrapbook to support family heritage and memory-making, a web app for collaborative music listening, a game-like mobile app for fostering teen financial independence, a lightweight portable keyboard for mobile devices, a design for a hologram-based interface aimed at combatting homesickness, a redesign of the university student web portal, and a web app to support the work practices of stay-at-home parents.

One thing I have really appreciated about my students is how they draw their intellectual strength from their compassion for others. I have been continuously impressed by the sophistication with which they talk about their research, and their commitment to understanding how values are embedded in design. For example, one of the teams spent the quarter working to design a tool to support the work practices of stay-at-home parents, with the goal of increasing the visibility and value of domestic work. In pursuit of this, they read up on Feminist HCI, reached out to a variety of communities of stay-at-home dads, and interviewed local parents.

We celebrated the end of the quarter with orange juice, doughnuts, and one final sketching critique!

I’m looking forward to seeing more from this group of students.