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.  Each week, one group will be responsible for presenting a paper and providing a short report of a maximum of 200 words about it. The weekly readings will collectively provide a conceptual toolkit for the design of creative artworks.  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 the 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 works of art.

Additionally, students will be asked to reflect on a special topic. This year’s topic is “the commons”. Students will have to write a short personal essay about their opinion and take on this topic.

They will also need to design in groups of 3 or 4 an artifact that instantiates this year’s topic. Their artifact should provide a theoretical, societal, and political commentary about the year’s topic and our responsibility as designers of interactive technologies.

Link to Papers

Week 1 : New/Creative Media

  • Manovich, Lev. ‘What Is New Media?’ In The Language of New Media, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2001.
  • Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ In Photography in Print, Writings from 1816 to the Present, 319-333. Ed. Vicki Goldberg, Simon and Shuster, New York NY, 1991.

Week 2: 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)- Download paper here ! 
  • 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).

Week 3: Feminism and politics 

  • 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 – Download paper here !
  • 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). 
  • Qian Yang, Richmond Y. Wong, Steven Jackson, Sabine Junginger, Margaret D. Hagan, Thomas Gilbert, and John Zimmerman. 2024. The Future of HCI-Policy Collaboration. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 820, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642771

Week 4 : Commoning and HCI

  • Bassetti, C., Sciannamblo, M., Lyle, P., Teli, M., De Paoli, S., & De Angeli, A. (2019). ‘Co-designing for common values: creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation’. CoDesign, 15(3), 256–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2019.1637897
  • Teli, Maurizio. ‘Computing and the Common: Hints of a New Utopia in Participatory Design’. In Proceedings of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives, 17–20. CA ’15. Aarhus N: Aarhus University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.21318.

Week 5:  Visit of IRCAM and Centre Pompidou 

Week 6: Sustainability and HCI

  • Gillespie, Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot. ‘Rethinking Repair’. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, 221–39. MIT Press, 2013. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6733973.
  • Rosner, Daniela K., and Morgan Ames. ‘Designing for Repair? Infrastructures and Materialities of Breakdown’. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 319–31. CSCW ’14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531692.

Week 6: Exhibition at the Fablab Saclay !

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 experience related to the topic, 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 assignments: 

The goal is to ideate an artwork that represents the theme of this year. It will be in the form of an artifact that provides a theoretical, societal, and political commentary about “the commons” and our responsibility as designers of interactive technologies. Students need to brainstorm ideas and make concrete plans on paper for the experiences that their artifacts will provide.  

Material for framing the Design Process is available Here

Week 4, 5 and 6 assignments: 

During the weeks 4 and 5 students need to have matured the design of their artifacts that instantiate this year’s theme.  Student should also start prototyping by exploring a variety of materials and design ideas. The artifact needs not to be computational or interactive, but can be if the students have a good argument for it. 

Week 7: Exhibition and Deliverables

Student should start preparing the deliverable that will consist of

  • The artifact
  • documentation in a written form
  • documentation in a video form

The documentation (written and vide) describes, analyzes, and discusses the design choices embedded within the artwork, conceptually, technically, and critically, and the resulting experience for the participants. It needs to include their use of the design concepts of the weekly reading as well as their interpretation of this year’s theme, analyze and describe their design decisions in the artifact that they have created. 

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 artifact.
  • Conduct an in-depth project about the design of an artwork.
  • Prepare and deliver written and video documentation demonstrating their application of the theoretical concepts and this year’s theme in the design of the artifact.

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 artifacts.

  • Class evaluation 30% 
    • Presentation of the readings                                  — 50%
    • General Participation                                               — 25%
    • Essay on the topic                                                   — 25%
  • Project evaluation 70% 
    • Documentation in written form                             — 40%
    • Design of the artifact                                             — 30%
    • Final artifact                                                            — 30%                                                             

ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS 

Presentation of the papers

Each group will make a presentation of one of the papers. Make the presentation fun. Be creative. You can make a theatre performance, or a radio show, or a walk. Avoid slides and summaries of the paper literally.

Essay of the year’s theme

The essay should capture the student’s personal take on the theme. It can be illustrated by their own personal experiences and cultural backgrounds.

Written documentation: 

In order to articulate the ideas and design process, the writing documentation should follow the plan of an HCI (interactivity) paper. Students need to focus on the design process more than the final outcome ! See the additional material below. 

Video documentation: 

Students can also prepare a video of their projects, preferably with narration explaining their process and the resulting artifact designed. 

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL 

Sensors available:

Tutorials on:

Tutorial on How to Articulate an HCI Paper:

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.