Courses are curated each year to provide a range of exciting opportunities to learn something new. Unlike peer/collaborative workshops, courses are: teaching delivered by instructors, typically with a strong track record. Courses may be between 1-4 units (of 80min conference slots) which run in parallel with the papers tracks. Courses typically cost $25 per unit, and some could have an additional cost for resources. You should register for courses at the time of registration (although it is sometimes also possible to register on the day of arrival).
Courses are organized in five major categories: HCI – Intro, Research Methods, Design, Engineering, and Professional Skills.
We encourage everyone participating in CHI 2019 to consider attending courses.
Daniela Busse, Oracle, CA, USA
Evan Karapanos, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus
Paul Cairns, University of York, York, United Kingdom
List of Courses
HCI – Intro
- Preparing for the Future of HCI by Understanding the Past and Present
- Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction
Research Methods
Foundational
- Empirical Research Methods for Human-Computer Interaction
- Ethnographic Methods for Human Factors Researchers: Collecting and Interweaving Threads of HCI
- Insights in Experimental Data through Intuitive and Interactive Statistics
Spotlight Topics
- Bespoke Data Visualization using R and ggplot2
- Avoiding and Mitigating Ethical Traps in Technocentric Fieldwork
- User Experience (UX) Research in Games
- Eye Tracking Methodology in Screen-based Usability Testing
Design
- Modern vision science for designers: Making designs clear at a glance
- Intro to the Human Body: Wearability and Human Factors of Wearable Systems
- Designing with the Mind in Mind: The Psychological Basis for UI Design Guidelines
- Design for user interaction with intelligent systems
- Sketching in HCI: Hands-on Course of Sketching Techniques
- Conversation Design: Principles, Strategies, and Practical Application
- Tangible Ecosystem Design: Developing Disruptive Services for Digital Ecosystems
- Balancing Interaction Design
- Making with Fabric: Foundations of Soft Goods and E-Textiles Fabrication
- Design for wellbeing – tools for research, practice and ethics
- Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design
Engineering
- Make This! Introduction to Electronics Prototyping Using Arduino
- Rapid Prototyping of Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality Interfaces
- Prototyping Transparent and Flexible Electrochromic Displays
- Computational Interaction with Bayesian Methods
- Building Economic Models of Human Computer Interaction
Professional Skills
- Introduction to Legal Issues in Human-Computer Interaction
- Professional Presentation Training: Improve the User Experience of your CHI Presentation
- How to Write CHI Papers (Third Edition)
- Communicating your Research to the Public and the Press
HCI – Intro
Preparing for the Future of HCI by Understanding the Past and Present
1 Unit | Monday 12:20 (lunchtime course) | Course Website | C05
Attendees are encouraged to bring their own lunch (food options are nearby).
In this course we will cover the history of several HCI fields and discuss opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Software evolved from passively reacting to human input to today’s dynamic partnership. In some areas HCI advanced steadily, elsewhere it reached dead ends or seemed to go in circles. Understanding these patterns will prepare you to respond to unexpected developments in years to come. The rapid pace of change leaves some tools and technologies behind. We must focus our attention primarily on current developments. To make use of relevant information in other fields you must understand how their terminologies, priorities, and methods evolved. The forces that shaped HCI in computer science, human factors, information systems, information science, and design are covered, with examples and implications for our new era.
Instructor(s)
Jonathan Grudin
Jonathan Grudin is a member of the CHI Academy and an ACM Fellow. He has authored a book and many papers on this topic. He has worked in industry, industry research, and academia.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The intended audience is anyone looking for a perspective on how their work might fit into HCI broadly defined—students, faculty including those teaching or interested in an HCI overview, and other researchers, developers, designers. The course is not an engineering history focusing on who did what when, nor is it a theoretical or conceptual history tracing the evolution of interface objects or methods. It examines how different fields contributed over time to HCI, what they have focused on, and how and why they did or did not interact. It presents patterns that emerged in work within and across fields.
Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction
3 Units | Monday 11:00 | C06
The objective of this course is to provide newcomers to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with an introduction and overview of the field. Attendees often include practitioners without a formal education in HCI, and those teaching HCI for the first time. This course includes content on theory, cognition, design, evaluation, and user diversity.
Instructor(s)
Jonathan Lazar, Simone Barbosa
Jonathan Lazar is a Professor in the College of Information Studies, Associate Director of the Trace Center, and core faculty at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, all at the University of Maryland. He has published 12 books, including “Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction” (co-authored with Feng and Hochheiser, 2nd edition), and “Ensuring Digital Accessibility through Process and Policy” (co-authored with Goldstein and Taylor). He has published primarily on interface accessibility for people with disabilities, user-centered design methods, and the relationship between HCI and law and policy, and is the recipient of the 2016 SIGCHI Social Impact Award.
Simone Barbosa is Associate Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio, Brazil. She has co-authored the HCI textbook recommended by the Brazilian Computer Society for undergraduate programs, “Interação Humano-Computador” (“Human-Computer Interaction” in Portuguese), and has engaged in several HCI design projects with industry. Since October 2017, she has been co-editor-in-chief of ACM Interactions Magazine.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The intended audience is made up of professionals in information and communication technology-related fields who have not yet had a systematic exposure to the discipline of HCI. This course often includes three specific groups of attendees: 1) first-time attendees of the CHI conference who are newcomers to HCI, 2) HCI practitioners without a formal education in HCI, and 3) individuals who will be teaching HCI for the first time and are therefore collecting structured approaches and various examples to reuse in their own courses.
Research Methods
Foundational
Empirical Research Methods for Human-Computer Interaction
2 Units | Monday 14:00 | Course Website | C08
Attendees will learn how to conduct empirical research in human-computer interaction (HCI). A “user study” is founded on observation, measurement, and posing and answering testable research questions. This Course delivers an A-to-Z tutorial on designing a user study and demonstrates how to write a successful CHI paper. It would benefit anyone interested in conducting a user study or writing a CHI paper. Only a general knowledge of HCI is required.
Instructor(s)
Scott MacKenzie, Steven Castellucci
Scott MacKenzie is an HCI professor and SIGCHI Academy member. He has more than 180 HCI publications (44 from the SIGCHI conference and 2 HCI books) and has given numerous invited talks over the past 20 years. Steven Castellucci has six SIGCHI publications, and has taught HCI courses in university.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
This course caters to attendees who want to learn about and use empirical research methods in HCI. It is for those in academia or industry who evaluate interaction techniques (e.g., user experience designers), or those who make decisions based on usability tests. Only a general knowledge of HCI is required.
Ethnographic Methods for Human Factors Researchers: Collecting and Interweaving Threads of HCI
4 Units | Tuesday 9:00 | Course Website | C10
This course offers an introduction to ethnography for Human Factors Research. It covers relevant topics along the research process from decision arguments for the method and study design, up to data collection, analysis and interpretation. Ethical questions will include the researcher’s role(s) in the field and modes of data presentation. The collection of multi-dimensional sets of data – a trademark of high-quality ethnographic work – enables inter-weaving threads of CHI perspectives in complex human factors research contexts. To achieve this, a comprehensive toolbox of ethnographic methods is introduced along with practical hands-on work phases to familiarize with these methodological instruments.
Instructor(s)
Frauke Mörike
Frauke Mörike has worked as IT professional in the industry for over a decade and holds a PhD in organizational anthropology. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in a consulting firm in Mumbai (India) and teaches ethnographic research methods in the Human Factors Master’s Program at Technische Universität Berlin.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
MA/PhD students, researchers and practitioners with limited or without previous experience in ethnographic research.
Insights in Experimental Data through Intuitive and Interactive Statistics
4 Units | Tuesday 9:00 | Course Website | C09
It is not unusual for empirical scientists, who are often not specialists in statistics, to have only limited trust in the statistical analyses that they apply to their data. The claim of this course is that an improved human-computer interaction with statistical methods can be accomplished by providing a simple mental model of what statistics does, and to support this model through well-chosen visualizations and interactive exploration. This course will use the program ILLMO to show how frequent statistical tasks such as hypothesis testing, correlation and clustering can be performed in an intuitive and interactive way.
Instructor(s)
Jean-Bernard Martens
Jean-Bernard Martens is a professor in the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He has been active in the field of HCI since 2000, and has contributed to topics such as quantifying interactions in virtual and augmented environments and user experience over time and across subjects.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is relevant for CHI researchers interested in quantitative data collection, either for confirmatory or exploratory analysis. The course does not require any advanced mathematical or statistical knowledge, only an understanding of the distinction between an observed histogram and a theoretical probability distribution. The former summarizes the observed fractions, e.g., the number of times heads and tails are observed in an actual coin-flipping experiment. The latter defines the model probabilities, such as the a priori probabilities of observing head or tail.
Spotlight Topics
Bespoke Data Visualization using R and ggplot2
1 Unit | Wednesday 14:00 | Course Website | C21
Being able to visualize data in consistent high-quality ways is a useful skill for HCI researchers and practitioners. In this course, attendees will learn how to produce high quality plots and visualizations using the ggplot2 library for the R statistical computing language. There are no prerequisites and attendees will leave with scripts to get them started as well as foundational knowledge of free open-source tools that they can build on to produce complex, even interactive, visualizations.
Instructor(s)
Sandy J. J. Gould
Sandy Gould is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Birmingham. Gould is an experienced classroom practitioner and has made extensive use of ggplot2 as the Analytics Chair for CHI 2018 and 2019. He has previously run courses at CHI 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Useful to anyone who is struggling with Excel or SPSS to produce visualizations. Will be useful to both researchers and practitioners. No prerequisite experience is required.
Avoiding and Mitigating Ethical Traps in Technocentric Fieldwork
2 Units | Wednesday 9:00 | Course Website | C17
We are witnessing an increase in fieldwork within the field of HCI, particularly involving marginalized or under-represented populations. This has posed ethical challenges for researchers during such field studies, with “ethical traps” not always identified during planning stages. This is often aggravated by the inconsistent policy guidelines, training, and application of ethical principles. We ground this in our collective experiences with ethically-difficult research, and frame it within common principles that are common across many disciplines and policy guidelines – representative of the instructors’ diverse and international backgrounds.
Instructor(s)
Cosmin Munteanu, Roisin McNaney, Jenny Waycott
The organizers are researchers who study the issue of ethics within HCI. Two of the instructors serve on the SIGCHI Ethics Committee. All had prior experience as ethics reviewers for university applications. One instructor has received a grant to study the ethical practices and state of knowledge within HCI.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is primarily aimed at university-based researchers (faculty, students, etc.), although everyone is welcome to join — we anticipate that anyone who is facing ethical dilemmas in their HCI fieldwork will find the material and the interactive case studies useful. No prior knowledge is required.
User Experience (UX) Research in Games
3 Units | Thursday 9:00 | Course Website | C25
This course will allow participants to understand the complexities of games user research methods. For this, we have put together three-course sessions at CHI (80 minutes each) on applications of different user research methods in games evaluation and playtesting exercises to help participants turn player feedback into actionable design recommendations. We will teach you how to run a basic play test for a game and how to report your findings so that they become actionable for your stakeholders.
Instructor(s)
Lennart E. Nacke, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Anders Drachen
All three instructors are editors of the games user research book and have considerable expertise in UX research in games. Both, Pejman and Lennart have taught courses at CHI and CHI PLAY before and received positive evaluations.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
We believe that all participants will benefit from our cross-disciplinary approach that will show the real value of games user research practices for game design. we hope to bring this all together to make it visible to everyone in the course, how much better their games will work with iterative playtesting integrated in the development process.
Eye Tracking Methodology in Screen-based Usability Testing
3 Units | Thursday 9:00 | Only a few spots remaining! | C24
Eye tracking is an important tool in usability testing of a screen-based user interface. Though eye tracking has been used in usability testing for quite a while, challenges remain. For example, how to accurately calibrate gaze point? How to interpret a scan pattern? In this tutorial, we will introduce the basics of the human oculomotor system, the role of eye tracking in cognition, eye tracking recording techniques, and data analysis methods. Upon the completion of this tutorial, students will have a basic understanding of physiological and psychological mechanisms underlying eye tracking, data collection techniques, and data analysis methods.
Instructor(s)
Lin Wang
Dr. Lin Wang is a Research Psychologist with a range of expertise including human performance analysis, eye tracking research, data analytics, healthcare research, and information technology. In his human factors research, Dr. Wang’s interest has been centered on information processing in persons with normal and impaired vision. He has more than 30 years of experiences in eye tracking research using three major methods: Infra-red pupil-center/corneal-reflection technology, electro-oculography, and scleral search coil technology. Dr. Wang has conducted a variety of human performance and usability evaluation studies including air traffic controller vigilance, prosthetic vision, online survey instruments, data dissemination websites, and mobile-device-based web applications; and published about 20 peer-reviewed research articles. He is currently serving as the leader of the Human Factors Research Group at the U.S. Census Bureau.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
The intended audiences are user experience researchers and practitioners with beginning or intermediate level of experience in user testing or user research.
Design
Modern vision science for designers: Making designs clear at a glance
1 Unit | Monday 11:00 | Course Website | C02
Why do some interfaces allow users to find what they need easily, while others do not? What information can the visual system effortlessly extract, and what requires slower, more cognitive processes? What does eye-tracking data tell us about what users perceive? Vision scientists have recently made ground-breaking progress in understanding many aspects of vision that are key to good design. This course reviews state-of-the-art vision science, including a computational model that visualizes the available information. We will demonstrate use of this model in evaluating and guiding visual designs.
Instructor(s)
Ruth Rosenholtz, Dian Yu
Ruth Rosenholtz is a Principal Research Scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of CSAIL. She has a Ph.D. in EECS (Computer Vision) from UC Berkeley. Her work focusses on developing predictive models of visual processing, and on applying understanding of human vision to image fidelity (NASA Ames), and to design of user interfaces and information visualizations (Xerox PARC and MIT). She is a world expert in peripheral vision and its implications for how we think about vision, attention, and design.
Dian Yu is a postdoctoral associate at CSAIL, MIT. She has her Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University. Dian is passionate about applying vision science to solve design problems. She was awarded the Cognitive Science Graduate Fellowships for Interdisciplinary Research Projects (2013) and best talk award at OPAM (2015). Her current work focuses on researching how to visualize grouping information or structures that can be well perceived in the visual periphery.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course will benefit a broad audience, including: Students who want a quick overview of the state-of-the-art vision science findings. Industrial and academic researchers, who will gain updated perspectives on vision for design usability. Designers and developers, who will learn about new tools for design. No prerequisite is required.
Intro to the Human Body: Wearability and Human Factors of Wearable Systems
1 Unit | Thursday 14:00 | Sold out! | C28
The traditional “human” model in human-computer interaction prioritizes the human brain, with physical and sensory interaction as secondary emphases. As wearable technologies proliferate and mature, the user experience and human factors of the rest of the body become increasingly important. This course will provide an overview of the basic foundations of wearability and human factors of wearable systems, from anatomy and physiology to body schema, physiological experience of on-body artifacts, and the ways in which dress affects and communicates identity and social relationships.
Instructor(s)
Lucy E. Dunne
Lucy Dunne is a Professor at the University of Minnesota (Apparel Design, Human Factors and Ergonomics, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science), where she co-directs the Wearable Technology Lab. She co-authored “Functional Clothing Design: From Sportswear to Space Suits”, the foundation text in human factors and conceptual physics of clothing systems.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is intended for researchers, designers, and practitioners who are interested in broadening their scope and perspective in HCI to include wearable on-body systems and clothing.
Designing with the Mind in Mind: The Psychological Basis for UI Design Guidelines
2 Units | Wednesday 9:00 | C16
UI design rules and guidelines are not simple recipes. Applying them effectively requires determining rule applicability and precedence and balancing trade-offs when rules compete. By understanding the underlying psychology, designers and evaluators enhance their ability to apply design rules. This two-part (160-minute) course explains that psychology.
Instructor(s)
Jeff Johnson
Jeff Johnson teaches Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He has a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Stanford. He was elected to the CHI Academy and received SIGCHI’s Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He authored several influential UI books, including the book this course is based upon.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Software designers and developers of all experience levels, especially those who did not take cognitive psychology in college or who lack education in recent brain-based perceptual and cognitive psychology. Others who might benefit: Software Q/A engineers, usability testers, and development managers.
Design for user interaction with intelligent systems
1 Unit | Thursday 9:00 | C23
Intelligence’ is now a widely accepted part of systems that we interact with every day, but comes in many forms as far as the user is concerned. There is a need for interaction designers to have a better understanding about the nature of intelligent systems and be able to categorise different types of intelligence as it appears to the user. The aim of this course is to give attendees an appreciation of what intelligence or smartness within computer systems is, how we currently perceive it, and what are the enablers and barriers to its effective use. The course will categorise different kinds of intelligence capability. It will also offer interaction design guidelines or heuristics for the design or evaluation of user interfaces with intelligent features to enable them to be more effective as partners with humans. It will use a mixture of teaching techniques combining presentations, discussions and class exercises.
Instructor(s)
Maguire, Martin
Martin Maguire has a background in computer studies and ergonomics. His main interests are in the usability of interactive systems including the needs of inexperienced users, older people and people with disabilities. He has been involved in several EU projects to develop human factors tools, methods and guidelines to promote usability within European IT projects and programmes. He has conducted ergonomic appraisals of IT and web-based systems for many public sector and private organisations in the UK. He is interested in the development of intelligent systems and how to design and evaluate the user interaction with, and user experience of them. He teaches HCI, usability and user-experience design within the Design School and Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The tutorial will be aimed at HCI researchers or anyone with an interest user interaction with artificial intelligence systems. The session will not assume any technical knowledge and is intended for interaction designers, UX designers and researchers as well as research students in HCI, who are beginning to think about the implications of AI systems for user interface design. It will cover AI technologies and concepts at a basic level so would be less suitable for those who are specialists in intelligent systems and offer a framework for thinking about them from a user perspective.
Sketching in HCI: Hands-on Course of Sketching Techniques
3 Units | Monday 11:00 | Course Website | C03
Freehand sketching is a valuable process, input, output, and tool, often used by people to communicate and express ideas, as well as document, explore and describe concepts between researcher, user, or client. Sketches are fast, easy to create, and – by varying their fidelity – can be used in all areas of HCI. Sketching in HCI will explore and demonstrate themes around sketching in HCI with the aim of producing tangible outputs. Attendees will leave the course with the confidence to engage actively with sketching on an everyday basis in their research practice.
Instructor(s)
Makayla M Lewis, Miriam Sturdee, Nicolai Marquardt
Makayla Lewis uses visual methods to explore human factors in private data management. She is a visual artist who organizes sketching events/courses and provides sketchnotes for international companies and conferences. Miriam Sturdee investigates sketching in the design of novel interfaces and public engagement and is a trained illustrator. Nicolai Marquardt is well known for his collaboration on Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The content of this course is suitable for individuals from industry and academia that have an interest in learning and or improving their sketching skills. Novices, experts and those with an interest are welcome to attend.
Conversation Design: Principles, Strategies, and Practical Application
3 Units | Thursday 9:00 | Sold out! | C26
With the rise of digital assistants, chatbots, and other conversational interfaces, there’s a huge demand for detail and instruction for Conversation Design. This course provides a focused walkthrough of the principles, strategies, and process of Conversation Design. Topics include understanding users, defining persona, analyzing conversation components, dialog writing strategies, and the detailed process of creating natural dialog. Interactive components at each stage engage participants with individual worksheets, small group exercises and reviews, and a team project. Participants will gain an understanding of the complexity and challenges of Conversation Design, and learn about resources and tools for doing it well.
Instructor(s)
Margaret Urban, Stephen Mailey
Margaret Urban and Stephen Mailey are senior Conversation Designers at Google, with deep experience in Voice User Interface design. Both have led and mentored design groups, presented at academic and professional conferences, and led successful productive workshops.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
This course is aimed at anyone who is interested in designing conversations for voice assistants or chatbots, as well as those who just want to learn about the Conversation Design space. This includes UX Writers, Interaction Designers, Cognitive scientists, and linguists, as well as stakeholders who want a deeper understanding of this fundamental area of communication.
Tangible Ecosystem Design: Developing Disruptive Services for Digital Ecosystems
4 Units | Wednesday 9:00 | Course Website | C20
The epoch of the platform economy has arrived. Companies face the question of how to build up disruptive digital services with disruptive business models and establish a digital ecosystem. Traditional UCD methods concentrate on the conception of particular services. Nevertheless, most of these are isolated solutions of single companies. Building services for the digital transformation era requires additional methods to come up with end-to-end consumer experiences and sustainable business models across boundaries of single companies for benefiting consumers. In this course participants learn the “Tangible Ecosystem Design” Method (TED), that supports the conception of Digital Ecosystems by using tangible elements.
Instructor(s)
Claudia Nass, Marcus Trapp
Claudia Nass is industrial and graphic designer. Dr. Marcus Trapp is computer scientist and department Head at the Fraunhofer IESE. Since 2001, they have driven projects with focus on the development and implementation of UX methods in the fields of creativity, innovation, user research and interaction design.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
This course is designed for: people involved in creating new digital services in the era of the digital transformation, people working with innovation methods in user experience design and research, user Experience Designers, Service Designers, Digital Designers, Digital Business Managers, Innovation Managers, and Design Thinking Adopters.
Balancing Interaction Design
4 Units | Tuesday 9:00 | Course Website | C13
One shape of design doesn’t fit all. We must balance strategic, creative and human-centred design inputs, and integrate them without imposing a single centre or fixed process. This course develops hands-on skills in collecting design inputs and creatively integrating them into well-connected wholes. It begins by contrasting and combining 20th century pre-structured design processes with the actual processes and practices repeatedly encountered in systematic studies of design work. The resulting novel approach to design work that will be applied in a series of exercises that form design arena canvasses, integrate across arenas using worth-focused approaches, and critical reflect on implicit assumptions to plan creatively led evidence-based design work.
Instructor(s)
Gilbert Cockton
Gilbert Cockton has been an Interaction Designer since 1982, initially designing and developing e-learning and games, and then business and engineering user interfaces, and most recently mostly websites. He has worked for and in industry in several roles. Since 2009, he has been Professor of Design Theory in the School of Design at Northumbria University.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
Attendees should ideally have experience of design/development projects from initiation to completion, mastery of one discipline (e.g., computing, design, engineering, marketing, innovation) and awareness of others. Most important is a willingness to have existing positions and values challenged, and to try out new challenging approaches with attendees from diverse backgrounds.
Making with Fabric: Foundations of Soft Goods and E-Textiles Fabrication
1 Unit | Monday 11:00 | Only a few spots remaining! | C01
Wearable technologies afford more pervasive access to the human user: higher bandwidth for communication in multiple modalities, and better context-awareness through sensing the user’s body and environment. However, stand-alone devices like wristbands and clip-ons are limited in the body areas they can simultaneously access. Clothing and textiles provide a useful platform for distributed systems, but present unique challenges in design and fabrication. This course provides an introduction to the tools, methods, and techniques of designing and fabricating with soft goods, including patternmaking and construction techniques for different material types at multiple scales, and e-textile methods and materials.
Instructor(s)
Lucy E. Dunne
Lucy Dunne is a Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Apparel Design program and co-directs the Wearable Technology Lab. She co-authored “Functional Clothing Design: From Sportswear to Space Suits”, the foundation text in human factors and conceptual physics of clothing systems.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Intended for researchers, designers, and practitioners who are interested in clothing- and textile-based wearable technologies. No prior experience is required.
Design for wellbeing – tools for research, practice and ethics
2 Units | Tuesday 14:00 | Course Website | Sold out! | C14
A demand for more “Humane Technologies” is forcing companies to rethink digital business as usual. Indeed, any move towards more ethical design requires that technologies respect our psychological needs. Recent research has uncovered ways to make psychologically respectful technologies possible. By integrating theory and methods from multiple disciplines, we can design technologies to “do no harm” and even increase psychological wellbeing. In this course we introduce methods for designing technologies that respect human wellbeing, and situate this work within an ethical framework. We also provide practical tools for ideation, design, and the evaluation of the psychological impacts of products.
Instructor(s)
Rafael A.Calvo, Dorian Peters
Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters have been pioneering work in design for wellbeing for six years, during which time they co-authored Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential from MIT Press (2014) and numerous peer-reviewed publications on the theoretical and practical aspects of wellbeing-supportive design. Most recently, their efforts toward advancing methods in the area have led to a collaboration with world-leading motivation psychologist and founder of Self-Determination Theory, Richard M. Ryan. Together, the trio (an engineer, a designer and a wellbeing psychologist) devised the METUX model of “Motivation, Engagement and Thriving in User Experience” which defines 6 spheres of digital experience within which psychological needs can be met or frustrated. These will be presented along with new scales for measuring a technology’s impact on psychological wellbeing (at the level of interface, task, behaviour and life). They are currently fellows at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Rafael is also visiting Professor at Imperial College, London.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Appropriate for HCI professionals of any background and at any point in their career who are interested in exploring the impact of technology on psychological wellbeing.
Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design
2 Units | Tuesday 14:00 | Course Website | C15
A crucial step in designing a user interface for a software application is to design a coherent, task-focused conceptual model (CM). With a CM, designers design better, developers develop better, and users learn and use better. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped, resulting in incoherent, arbitrary, inconsistent, overly-complex applications that impede design, development, learning, understanding, and use. This course covers what CMs are, how they help, how to develop them, and provides hands-on experience.
Instructor(s)
Jeff A Johnson
Jeff Johnson teaches Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He has a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Stanford. He was elected to the CHI Academy and received SIGCHI’s Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He authored several influential UI books, including the book this course is based upon.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
Software designers and developers of all levels of experience. Others who might benefit: Software Q/A engineers, usability testers, and development managers.
Engineering
Make This! Introduction to Electronics Prototyping Using Arduino
2 Units | Tuesday 9:00 | Course Website | C11
Make This! is a hands-on introduction to interactive electronics prototyping for people with a variety of backgrounds, including those with no prior experience in electronics. Familiarity with programming is helpful, but not required. Presented as self-guided tutorials and short lectures, with individual instructor attention. Participants learn basic electronics, microcontroller programming and physical prototyping using the Arduino platform, then use digital and analog sensors, LED lights and motors to build, program and customize a small “paper robot.” The electronics kit and paper robot are theirs to keep. David, Nik and Wendy have taught this course at CHI since 2013.
Instructor(s)
David Sirkin, Nikolas Martelaro, Wendy Ju
Wendy is Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. David is Executive Director for Interaction Design at Stanford’s Center for Design Research. Nik joined Accenture Labs after completing a PhD at Stanford and Postdoc at Cornell Tech. Together, they have developed and presented courses for academic and professional audiences around the world.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is intended for an audience that is new to, wants to know more about, or already has a passing familiarity with, the tools, techniques, and resources for electronics and physical prototyping. No electronics, programming, or prototyping experience is required, although some familiarity with programming is helpful.
Rapid Prototyping of Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality Interfaces
2 Units | Tuesday 9:00 | Course Website | Sold out! | C12
This course introduces participants to rapid prototyping techniques for augmented reality and virtual reality interfaces, using both physical prototyping with paper and Play-Doh as well as digital prototyping via new visual authoring tools for AR/VR. The course comprises an introduction to AR/VR prototyping principles and materials, two hands-on prototyping sessions with physical materials and digital tools, and a peer review and critique session of participants’ AR/VR prototypes. The course is targeted at non-technical audiences including HCI practitioners, user experience researchers, and interaction design professionals and students. A useful byproduct will be a small portfolio piece of a first AR/VR interface designed iteratively and collaboratively in teams.
Instructor(s)
Michael Nebeling
Michael Nebeling is an Assistant Professor at UMSI, where he directs the Information Interaction Lab (https://mi2lab.com). He studies the next generation of user interfaces, as well as the methods and tools to create them. His recent work includes new prototyping tools for AR/VR interfaces, such as ProtoAR for smartphone-based AR scenes with 3D props modeled with Play-Doh and GestureWiz for flexible design and experimentation of gesture-based interactions. Professor Nebeling has given various courses on principles of interaction design at ETH Zurich, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Michigan since 2011. He currently teaches undergraduate and graduate interaction design studios as well as a new AR/VR introductory course on rapid prototyping techniques also at the core of this course.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is designed for non-technical audiences. Participants with basic knowledge in HCI, user experience, and interaction design will find the contents of this course accessible. There is no need for programming. However, for more advanced participants, the instructor will also be able to share tips and resources, including information on how the techniques could be incorporated with advanced AR/VR development workflows with tools like Unity.
Prototyping Transparent and Flexible Electrochromic Displays
3 Units | Thursday 9:00 | Course Website | Sold out! | C27
This course is a hands-on introduction to the fabrication of flexible, transparent free-form displays based on electrochromism for an audience with a variety of backgrounds, including artists and designers with no prior knowledge of physical prototyping. Besides prototyping using screen printing or ink-jet printing of electrochromic ink and an easy assembly process, participants will learn essentials for designing and prototyping electrochromic displays.
Instructor(s)
Markus Löchtefeld, Walther Jensen, Heiko Müller, Ashley Colley
All of the Instructors have several years of experience of teaching in higher education. The study programmes the instructors supervise and teach in represent a large variety of students ranging from Textile Designers to Computer Scientists.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The course is intended for an audience that wants to know about prototyping with flexible displays and printed electronics. Participants should have sufficient technical background to download, install and run the Arduino programming environment on their laptops, and be able to physically handle (or have assistance handling) simple manual prototyping techniques. Furthermore, basic knowledge of graphical design and image editing as well as basic electronics will be an advantage.
Computational Interaction with Bayesian Methods
4 Units | Wednesday 9:00 | Course Website | C18
This course introduces computational methods in human– computer interaction. Computational interaction methods use computational thinking—abstraction, automation, and analysis—to explain and enhance interaction. This course introduces the theory of practice of computational interaction by teaching Bayesian methods for interaction across four wide areas of interest when designing computationally-driven user interfaces: decoding, adaptation, learning and optimization. The lectures center on hands-on Python programming interleaved with theory and practical examples grounded in problems of wide interest in human-computer interaction.
Instructor(s)
Per Ola Kristensson, Nikola Banovic, Antti Oulasvirta, John H Williamson
The instructors are all faculty members (three of them tenured) at leading international research universities with many award-winning research papers between them demonstrating the merits of computational interaction for HCI problems. Two of the instructors co-edited the book Computational Interaction published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Primarily targeted at researchers and PhD students in HCI. Industrial practitioners, interested for example in data-driven design or new interface technologies, may also find the course valuable.
Building Economic Models of Human Computer Interaction
4 Units | Wednesday 9:00 | C19
Economics provides an intuitive and natural way to formally represent the cost and benefits of interacting with applications, interfaces and devices. By using economics models it is possible to reason about interaction and make predictions about how changes to the system will affect performance and behavior. In this course, we provided an overview of relevant economic concepts and then showed how economics can be used to model human computer interaction to generated hypotheses about interaction which can be used to inform design and guide experimentation. As a case study, we demonstrate how various interactions with search and recommender applications can be modeled, before concluding the day with a hands-on modeling session using example and participant problems.
Instructor(s)
Leif Azzopardi, Guido Zuccon
Dr. Leif Azzopardi is an Associate Professor who has been recently awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship in Data Science at the University of Strathclyde within the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He has an extensive research portfolio and is a leading author at ACM SIGIR (H-Index:28, Citations: 3709, Google Scholar). His research focuses on building formal models for Information Retrieval. He has given numerous invited talks and tutorials on Formal Models throughout the world. He won a best paper honourable mention in 2014 for his work on economic models at ACM SIGIR.
Dr Guido Zuccon is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. He has over 100 publications (H-Index: 23, Citations: 1809, Google Scholar), where his research interests include formal models of search, ranking principles for Information Retrieval, and retrieval and user models for health search. He was recently awarded a Early Career DECRA awarded by the Australian Research Council.
Leif and Guido have presented related courses at ACM SIGIR 2015, ACM CIKM 2016, ACM ICTIR 2016 and ACM CHIIR 2017. They have recently contributed a chapter on building economic models of interaction to the book ‘Computational Interaction’ published in 2018.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The intended audience would be students undertaking a PhD in UI/UX design, and practitioners wanting to know how to optimise their UI/UX design by using formal economic models of user behaviour and interaction. The tutorial is designed to be introductory, progressing to intermediate.
Professional Skills
Introduction to Legal Issues in Human-Computer Interaction
2 Units | Wednesday 14:00 | C22
This two-unit course provides an overview of legal issues within human-computer interaction. Practitioners and researchers within human-computer interaction are often faced with legal issues involving their HCI work. For instance, there are legal requirements for working with human participants in HCI research; for making web sites and technologies accessible for people with disabilities, and intellectual property issues related to both HCI research and practice. This course will provide a basic understanding of legal issues in five different areas of HCI: accessibility, privacy, intellectual property, telecommunications, and requirements in using human participants in research.
Instructor(s)
Jonathan Lazar, Raja Kushalnagar, Casey Fiesler, G. Anthony Giannoumis
Three of the four instructors have BOTH PhDs in Computing/HCI AND law degrees!
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
The target audience for this course, is individuals who are faced with understanding legal issues within their HCI research or practice. Often, HCI researchers and practitioners are faced with legal-related issues in their HCI work, but very few HCI researchers or practitioners have a background or a formal education in law.
Professional Presentation Training: Improve the User Experience of your CHI
Presentation
2 Units | Monday 14:00 | Course Website | C07
Come learn from Bloomberg UX designers how to apply professional design and presentation skills to your CHI presentation to ensure you make the biggest impact on your audience in the limited time and space you have. In part 1 you will learn how to convey your information and message visually: first by finding the key story you are trying to tell and then using principles of visual hierarchy to make that story pop! In part 2 you will learn how to convey your information orally: effectively getting and keeping your audience’s attention so they remember your message.
Instructor(s)
Ash Brown, Anthony Viviano
Ash has been a member of the international organization Toastmasters for 5 years, delivering more than 30 speeches and participating and winning in 6 Toastmasters competitions. She has served as President and VP of Education of the Bloomberg club. Professionally, she has used these skills to develop and deliver trainings in finance and user experience to more than 500 technology professionals.
At Bloomberg, she leads a team of designers responsible for designing Trade Execution and Post- Trade processing interfaces. She has worked in user experience in finance for seven years and has a deep understanding of how to find the story in highly technical topics and present them so they are easy to grasp.
Anthony has presented at UX Scotland, UX Cambridge and at a UXPA event.
At Bloomberg he leads the design for the Enterprise Console Website, a client-facing tool that gives users visibility into their connected systems and create alerts for any anomalies. In his time at Bloomberg, he also worked as a senior interaction designer for internal engineering applications and on Bloomberg’sprofessional mobile app. In 15+ years in UX design, Anthony has honed his presentation and public speaking skills as a conference presenter and through client presentations, which have included numerous sales pitches.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Anyone who is presenting their research visually or orally at CHI via posters or presentations.
How to Write CHI Papers (Third Edition)
3 Units | Monday 11:00 | Sold out! | Course Website | C04
Everything that we do as researchers is based on what we write. Primarily for graduate students and young researchers, it is hard to turn a research project into a successful CHI publication. This struggle continues for postdocs and young professors trying to provide excellent reviews for the CHI community that pinpoint flaws and improvements in research papers. This third edition of the successful CHI paper writing course offers hands-on advice on how to write papers with clarity, substance, and style. It is structured into three 80-minute units with a focus on writing and reviewing respectively.
Instructor(s)
Lennart E. Nacke
Lennart Nacke has many years of experience serving on SIGCHI program and steering committees. He has chaired the CHI PLAY 2014 and Gamification 2013 conferences, served as technical program co-chair for CHI PLAY 2015 and CHI Games and Play subcommittee co-chair for CHI 2017 and CHI 2018 and is currently papers chair of INTERACT 2019.
Intended Audience (Level: Medium)
This course introduces principles about writing and reviewing for CHI to a junior audience (this is not to assume that this course is not useful for senior CHI researchers, but the primary target are junior researchers, ranging from graduate students to postdocs and junior faculty, who are submitting to CHI).
Communicating your Research to the Public and the Press
2 Units | Repeated on Tuesday 09:00, Wednesday 14:00, Thursday 09:00 | Sold out! | Course Website | C29, C30, C31
Researchers are increasingly called upon to communicate with non-specialist audiences, but it can be difficult to communicate complex scientific topics in a way that makes them accessible and engaging to people outside the field. Further, interacting with the media can be daunting and frustrating and researchers frequently comment on how their work is misrepresented in the popular press. This course aims to give participants the skills needed to interact confidently with the media and to non-specialists, and get their key messages across.
Instructor(s)
Helen Pilcher
Helen is a professional science communicator, journalist, performer and author. A former scientist, she has spent the last 15 years making complicated science fun and interesting. She has worked for Nature and the Royal Society, and her writing has appeared in outlets including New Scientist, BBC Online and the Guardian. Drawing on her experiences in the worlds of stand-up comedy, storytelling and science journalism, she now specialises in teaching researchers how to deal with the media and communicate their work to wider audiences. She also drinks a lot of tea… and is partial to the odd biscuit.
Intended Audience (Level: Easy)
Anyone who wishes to improve their skills in public outreach, whether by improving their ability to communicate with a lay audience, or learning how to deal with the media. This course is free for SIGCHI members.
