CS 179

Course Information

Location	Pierce 301
Time	Tuesday, Thursday 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Instructor	Krzysztof Gajos

Course Description The course covers skills and techniques necessary to design innovative interactive products that are useful, usable and that address important needs of people other than yourself. You will learn how to uncover needs that your customers cannot even articulate. You will also learn a range of design principles, effective creativity-related practices, and techniques for rapidly creating and evaluating product prototypes. You will also have several opportunities to formally communicate your design ideas to a variety of audiences. You will complete two large team-based design projects.

Learning Objectives

1. Discover. The first question in Design is “What problem should we solve?”. Finding a good problem, particularly one that is important to people other than yourself, is hard because many big problems are so ingrained in people’s lives that they no longer notice them.
2. Invent. Creativity is about finding solutions that are novel, surprising and valuable. Creativity is a skill that can be learned and practiced. You will learn about the cognitive underpinnings of creativity and you will learn several techniques for managing your creative process.
3. Design Once you have an idea for a useful product, you will need to design it to be usable. You will learn the besics of human perception, motor performance, and cognition, as well as a number of design principles, that will help you generate designs for usable interactive systems.

Course Policies

• Studio attendance. Studio attendance is mandatory. If you have to miss a studio, you must let your studio leader know in advance, and receive an acknowledgment from the studio leader.
• Lecture attendance . You are expected to attend at least 2/3 of the lectures. Active participation is essential in this class and will contribute to the final grade.
• Lids down! You may not use laptops, tablets, phones or other electronic devices during the class (either lectures or studios) except when explicitly asked to do so by the instructor.