IIT’s Institute of Design (ID) is a world-renowned school of design. ITM professor Alon Friedman is also the Director of Information Technology for ID, and in the Spring 2013 term, he will be conducting a 3-credit-hour joint ITM-ID workshop course with two ID faculty members, Stan Ruecker and Anijo Mathew. The only prerequisites are ITM/ITMD 411 and an eagerness to work with designers to learn the communicational challenges and successful strategies for taking an agile methods approach to the creation of online prototypes of experimental human-computer interfaces. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students, and is great opportunity for graduate students to work with an interdisciplinary team in a real-world-style setting.

The workshop will be on Thursdays from 2pm-5:30pm at the Institute of Design, on the 4th floor at 350 North LaSalle Street, Chicago. This is a a 20 minute trip on the Green Line to Clark&Lake with a short, four-block walk to ID.
Email Professor Friedman (alon@id.iit.edu) for a permit to register for for 3 credit hours in:
   25895 ITM 497-135 Special Projects (Undergrads)
   25766 ITMT 597-135 Special Problems in IT (Graduate students)
Click “Read More…” for full details and course descriptions:
ID Courses:
ID 580_002 Interaction Design Research, instructor Stan Ruecker
ID 582_001 Communication Workshop, instructor Anijo Mathew

Interaction Design Workshop on design, programming, and user study
In this interaction design workshop, we will be doing research into the creation of three kinds of software intended to run on our large multitouch surface. Students will choose one of these projects and help to move it forward in its research trajectory.

1. Rich-Prospect Browsers: Rich-prospect browsers are a kind of visual interfaces where some meaningful representation of each item in a collection is combined with tools for manipulating the display. They are intended to give an overview of the material while allowing someone to actively group, sort, subset and otherwise make use of the overview for specific tasks. For content, we will be working with the titles and abstracts scraped from articles in several of the major design journals.
2. Structured Surfaces: The idea behind structured surfaces is that rather than maps with pins, the interface provides an information visualization that can have pins stuck in it. One manifestation of this idea is in workflow management tools, particularly for design management.
3. Conversational Modeling: Conversational sculpture, or conversational modeling, involves a set of visual experiments in making representations of discussions. In a software form, this approach might be used to help produce collective understandings of readings or other content by students working virtually but together.

Communication Workshop
This Communication Workshop will continue work done in earlier workshops by looking at media, place, and interaction design from the perspective of urban informatics. Students will work with the Chicago Architecture Foundation to research and design a platform approach for their physical model. We will specifically look at how new informatics tools such as tablets and smartphones are changing the way we consume and produce information. While this project starts from scratch, the idea is to also evaluate how existing informatics platforms will work in conjunction with CAF’s existing information delivery models (docents, tours, school/after school programs etc.)

This is an implementation scale workshop. The final projects from this workshop will be exhibited in the CAF exhibition – ‘City of Big Data’ in June 2013. We will work closely with all the parties involved including CAF, technology sponsors, architecture firms to come up with a tangible outcome at the end of the semester.

Format
In this graduate research workshop, we plan to combine into one work space the students from a course taught for programming students by Alon in the School of Applied Technology with courses taught by Anijo and Stan for design students at the Institute of Design.

The goal of this joint workshop is to have students learn the communicational challenges and successful strategies for taking an agile methods approach to the creation of online prototypes of experimental human-computer interfaces.

The workshop will emphasize the importance of accepting and acknowledging the intellectual contributions of all members of the process, including design, programming, and user studies, through the development and adoption of an interdisciplinary research project charter.

Our approach will be to offer students a choice of experimental projects that will be taken through the following stages:
• research goal
• research question
• concepts
• prototype
• user testing

We will arrange for user feedback at each stage. Results of the process will be documented and submitted to a relevant conference.