CS2013-final-report

Course textbooks and materials
There is no required textbook for this course, although we recommend Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction (New
Riders, 2009) if students ask. The following readings are required:
• Donald A. Norman, Chapter 1 (from The Design of Everyday Things, MIT Press, 1998)
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, First Principles of Interaction Design
• Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel, Designing for Experience: Frameworks and Project Stories
• Marc Rettig, Prototyping for Tiny Fingers
• William Horton, Top Ten Blunders by Visual Designers
• George Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for
Processing Information
• Thomas Kelley, “The Perfect Brainstorm” (from The Art of Innovation, Profile Books, 2002)
• Bill Buxton, “The Anatomy of Sketching” (from Sketching User Experiences, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007)
Why do you teach the course this way
This course used to be an elective course available to second and third year students. In the recent curriculum review
(2011) it was moved into the first year. It is likely that we will be tweaking this over the next couple of years as we
deliver it to a new cohort. We teach HCI as a full-on, hands-on experience, believing the best way to teach design is
by doing it. Some students (typically the less technical) like it very much; some students (typically the more
technical) find it troubling and “irrelevant”. Both sorts can find it challenging.
Body of Knowledge coverage
KA Knowledge Unit Topics Covered Hours
HCI Foundations All 4
HCI Designing Interaction All 4
HCI User-centered design & testing All 4
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