Creative Design

Creative Design

Syllabus:

Presentation – Creative Design

Weekly Readings:
This course requires students to read, reflect on a selection of authors’ ideas, and then share their findings with the class.  Weekly preparation for class includes a careful reading of all the assigned texts and short reading reports of maximum 200 words for each paper. The weekly readings will collectively provide a conceptual toolkit for the design of creative interactive art works.  When reading an article, students need to look for the “big picture” and important concepts that will inform their own work on the design of interactive artwork. Their task in this class is to identify and reflect on these high level concepts.  They will be useful as both scholarly citations and as functional design tools for interactive works of art.

Link to Papers

Week 1: New Media

  • Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”  [pages. 319-333] from Photography in Print, Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg, Simon and Shuster, New York NY, 1991 Full Paper here!

Week 2: Rethinking HCI through Performance

  • Sarah Fdili Alaoui. 2019. Making an Interactive Dance Piece: Tensions in Integrating Technology in Art. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’19).
  • Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Andy Crabtree, Martin Flintham, Brendan Walker, Joe Marshall, Boriana Koleva, Stefan Rennick Egglestone, Gabriella Giannachi, Matt Adams, et al. 2013. Performance-led research in the wild. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 20, 3 (2013), 1–22.

Week 3: Research through Design + Critical Design 

  • Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell. 2013. What is “Critical” About Critical Design?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13).
  • John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Shelley Evenson. 2007. Research Through Design As a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’07).
  • Mark Blythe 2017 Research Fiction: Storytelling, Plot and Design, In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17).

Week 4: Feminism and HCI 

  • Shaowen Bardzell, “Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design”. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI ’10
  • Teresa Almeida, Rob Comber, Gavin Wood, Dean Saraf, Madeline Balam. “On Looking at the Vagina Through Labella”. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Week 5:  HCI and Politics 

  • Os Keyes, Josephine Hoy, Margaret Drouhard, “Human-computer insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI”.In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’19). 
  • Lilly C. Irani and M. Six Silberman. 2016. “Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopticon and the Trouble with “Design.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’16).
  • Paul Dourish, HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics, Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, DIS, 16-20, 2010,

Week 6: HCI and repair 

  • Steven J. Jackson. 2014. Rethinking Repair. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (1 edition), Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (eds.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 221–240.
  • Daniela K. Rosner and Morgan Ames. 2014. Designing for Repair?: Infrastructures and Materialities of Breakdown. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’14), 319–331.

Week 7 : Exhibition of the students’ work 

Weekly practical assignment:

Week 1 assignment: 

Portfolio Assignment:  Prepare a 3 mins portfolio presentation for next week (with 3 slides/photos/texts/links/examples):

  • What you have done so far:
    • List all the art projects you have been part of, as well as all the tools that you have used and or developed that can be of relevance here (video, weblinks,..).
    • Up to three projects idea, or direction regarding what you would ideally like to end up doing (or being part of) in the class. Only if you have no ideas, then you can pitch projects of others that you find inspiring.

Project initiation :

  1. Team up!
  2. Start to imagine the craziest ideas for an interactive experience, what are you interested in? what would you like to offer to an audience? Have you ever had an art practice? why?

Week 2 and 3 assignment: 

The goal is to have input data using one of the available sensors to capture data and to integrate the data into a program on a platform of your choice: an arduino platform, a MaxMSP patch, or an openframeworks program for example.

Sensors available:

Week 4 and 5 assignment: 

During the week 4 and 5 students need to have matured the design of their interactive artifact that instantiate one or two theoretical concepts being discussed in the class.  The artwork must be digital and interactive.

Material for framing the Design Process is available Here

Week 6 assignment: 

Student should start to prepare the deliverable that will consist of original software and complete documentation. The documentation is an essay that describes, analyzes, and discusses the design choices embedded within the artwork, conceptually, technically, and critically, and the resulting experience for the participants. The paper needs to include their use of the design concepts of the weekly reading, analyze and describe their design decisions in the interactive artifact that they have created. Students will also be expected to orally present the artifact. The formal writing of their final project should be in the form of an interactivity paper, preferably in the CHI extended format

If appropriate, students should also prepare a video of their project, preferably with narration. The analysis of the artwork will rely on concepts drawn from the course readings. The evaluation of the participant’s experience will rely on qualitative or quantitative methodologies of the student’s choice.

Final Exhibition: 

The outcome of the 6 classes will be shared during an afternoon exhibition of students work. We will be setting up the exhibition in the morning and having visitors the whole afternoon. 

Learning Outcomes

The students will be able to:

  • Identify the key design principles across a range of related texts.
  • Participate substantively in discussions across the range of texts included in the course readings.
  • Apply these key principles in the design of their interactive artifact.
  • Conduct an in-depth project about the design of an interactive artwork.
  • Prepare and deliver a written paper demonstrating their application of the theoretical concepts in the design of the interactive artifact.
  • Present their interactive artifact during an exhibition

Evaluation:

Students will be graded on the quality of the work and the discussions they lead, and also on their general participation in the intellectual activity of the class.  The criterion in both cases will be the effective understanding and application of the concepts of the authors in the design of their artifact.

  • Class evaluation 50% 
    • Reports on weekly readings                                                    — 30%
    • General Participation                                                                 — 20%
    • Paper / Essay on the artwork (+ non mandatory Video)     — 50%
  • Project evaluation 50% 
    • Final artwork                                                                          — 100%

Tutorials on:

Tutorial on How to Write a Paper:

Writing and reflecting on the Interactive System. Guidance for writing a good HCI paper, inspired by S. Greenberg and J Galvan.

Abstract
The title should be descriptive and enticing, and should be followed by the full names, contact addresses, and email address of the authors. Abstracts are typically a 100-150 word overview of experiment, results and discussion. Well-written abstracts summarize the key findings of the paper as well as introduce the problem, so the reader knows what to expect.

1.Introduction
This section should give an overview of the general problem area, and should then focus on the particular problem you are going to investigate. Some things typically included in an introduction are:

  • general problem introduction and statement
  • review of experimental and commercial systems
  • discussion of the relevant literature (if any)
  • personal encounters with the problem
  • review of previous experiments
  • relevant psychological or other theories

2.Related Works
A literature review is not an annotated bibliography in which you summarize briefly each article that you have reviewed. While a summary of the what you have read is contained within the literature review, it goes well beyond merely summarizing professional literature. It focuses on a specific topic of interest to you and includes a critical analysis of the relationship among different works, and relating this research to your work. It may be written as a stand-alone paper or to provide a theoretical framework and rationale for a research study (such as a thesis or dissertation).

3.System Design
This section should clearly describe technically the system that you have designed.

4.Evaluation (If you conducted one)
This section should clearly define the problem, describe the subjects and the materials required, indicate the methodology, and list any problems encountered. Depending upon your particular experiment, the subsections below might be best presented in a different order and you may add further subsections as needed.

4.1 Introduction and goals
Introduce your experiment, and give the reader the specific goals you expect it to address. It is common at this stage to give the reader a hint of your hypotheses (if they are not already hinted at in the Introduction).

4.2 Methods
This is a detailed description of the experiment that ideally should allow other researchers to replicate your experiment.

4.2.1 Participants
Describe your participants (e.g., any relevant demographics, if/how they were divided into categories), including total number, and recruiting approach. Indicate if any incentives were used. Comment on the representativeness of your participants relative to the target population, if their representativeness isn’t immediately obvious.

4.2.2 Conditions
If your experiment is comparing multiple different interfaces or interactive systems or techniques, describe each of them. Screen snapshots of interfaces/systems are particularly useful.

4.2.3 Tasks
Briefly describe what participants were asked to do with the interactive system(s).

4.2.4 Design
Write the formal experimental design (e.g., a 2 x 3 mixed factorial design, more specifically a 2 levels of expertise (between subjects) x 3 interfaces (within subjects) design).

4.2.5 Procedure
Describe the sequence of activities each participant followed. This should document the experiment from a participant’s perspective.

4.2.6 Apparatus
Describe the physical setup of the experiment (e.g., where was it conducted, on what kind of equipment, etc.)

4.2.7 Independent and dependent variables
(If relevant) Include exactly how you intend to measure each dependent variable.

4.2.8 Hypotheses
(If relevant) Remember to state these in terms of the independent and dependent variables. If it is not immediately clear why you would have a certain hypothesis then include a brief explanation separate from but following the hypothesis. You do not need to state the null hypothesis.

5.Results (If you conducted an experiment/evaluation)
This section is a report on your analysis of the data collected or what the numbers show. You should not try to interpret the meaning of the numbers in this section. Some of the things you may do here are:

  • report means and standard deviations in neat tables
  • indicate the statistics used and levels of significance
  • include graphs, plots, histograms, etc that tell a story about the actual figures obtained

6.Discussion
Interpret the results. Although you should still try to be as objective as possible, the discussion section should illuminate your critical thinking about the results. Explain what the statistics mean, account for anomalies, and so on.

6.1 Interpretation of results (possibly)
Discuss what you believe the results really mean. For example, if you find a significant difference for some effect, what does that mean to the hypothesis? Is the different seen an important one?

6.2 Relation to other works
How do the results you’ve obtained relate to other research findings?

6.3 Impact for practitioners
As computer scientists, we are particularly concerned with the implications of our findings on practitioners. Should existing interface constructs be designed differently or used in a new context? Do you have suggestions for new designs? How can the findings be generalized?

6.4 Critical reflection
Critical reflection is one of the key foundations of science. You should criticize your work (constructively, if possible), indicate possible flaws, mitigating circumstances, the limits to generalization, conditions under which you would expect your findings to be reversed, and so on.

6.5 Research agenda
The best experiments suggest new avenues of exploration. In this section, you should reflect and refine your hypotheses, describe new hypotheses, and suggest future research, ie research that you would do if you continued along this path.

7.Conclusions
Summarize the report, and speculate on what is to come.

8.References
This list should contain only papers that have been cited in text. Citations should be in a standard form, and should include all citation information.

REF: Galvan, J. (2006). Writing literature reviews: a guide for students of the behavioral sciences (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Publishing.