And so week 1 of the fall semester in IU HCI/d has come to a close. It was quite refreshing to get back to the grind of school again, and to also be able to interact with the people in my classes again. I’m taking 3 classes here: Capstone (a year-long personal project), Interaction Culture (I’ll also be blogging on the class’s blog as well), and HCI Theory. It should be a wonderful semester full of learning and growth. I’m also an Assistant Instructor for an introductory programming class in Python, and that should be interesting as well. I’ve already gotten most of the assignments done, which will be helpful when I get fully fledged into the design space of capstone.

Interaction Culture Snapshot

So what is it that we do in this class? Well, this week, although it was an opening, we first learned how to start thinking about critique and knowing how cultural and critical theory can help a designer not only grow, but be able to critique a design from a much higher-level of thinking. This will help to generate further insights about design, what the designer is designing, and how what is being design affects the system it is in. One example: we took a look at fancy (i.e. awesome) shoes, and we able to critique them. Here’s the shoe I was handed (along with a preview of what I’ll talk about next):

Some of the thoughts I had about these shoes were: platform, 80s-style, thick shoelaces, amalgamation, combo of shiny and non shiny, entertaining, conversation starter, tread on the bottom goes onto the toes, hippy-like flowers, could see this as a DDR shoe, could be part of a set with a purse/satchel/manpurse, looks homemade, rich – the person hasa lot of money + DIY behaviors, the traditional tounge of a sneaker, some ankle supprt – the medium-high top, comfortable, yet warm, I wanna say disco, tight fit, not too many holes. Please feel free to add your two cents as well.

The goal of this exercise was to not only help open our eyes for critiquing purposes, but to also think the unthought and push this into the unknown.

HCI Theory Wrapup

During our first class with Erik, we were presented with the idea that this course will help us to find the metaphorical furniture of our brains and expose ourselves to these pieces. And by furniture, he means our own design ideas and biases. To first describe this, we did a quick exercise on how we work with other people: first, the goal is to draw a face with a friend, but each of you can only draw one line at a time. The face on the left (above) was the result of this process. The second face (right), was a result of taking the exact opposite approach in our heads to this design problem. It was pretty fun, and most of the class kept laughing while doing it. This was a fun exercise, which will help me keep liking the class, especially due to the high amount of reading involved. Images made with help of Ben

Capstone Fun

So, capstone finally started for our class, and I still have some questions as to how to approach or even get started with this giant project. So I am going to go and talk to some of my professors on this topic. It should be win – after all, the group I want to know more about and design for are cosplayers: these are the people who show their fandom by dressing up as their favorite anime and video game characters. There are few words to describe how excited I am about getting to know about this group, so I’ll save that for a future post. These will be under the category of “cosplay” here in the blog, so keep coming back for more.

Have fun! (^^)V