Category: Human-Centered Design
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the first design problem
There’s a great line in a recent exploration of near-future UX issues. It goes: Design is about solving problems. And deciding how to solve a problem is the first design problem to be solved. I like this report, but I want to offer a different perspective here. Deciding how to…
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Revised HCD Syllabus
I’m close to stabilizing the 2019 version of my human-centered design course. This is an 300-level undergraduate course that I teach here at Penn State’s College of Information Science and Technology. Students do a lot of sketching, prototyping, and design work. The course progresses from conceptual discussions of HCD, design…
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The Design Exchange
Today I discovered the design exchange. Think Wikipedia but for design methods and case studies. It seems like a great resource for students (and practitioners) curious about different design methods—especially their strengths, weaknesses, and relevance to different design projects and project stages. I’ll be using it in my spring semester course…
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conversations for vision
Another new pre-print dropped this week. This paper is a first draft of our findings from an interview study conducted with a fascinating group of practitioners who work to support people with visual impairments (PVI). Here’s how the service works: PVI connect with a remote sighted assistant via a mobile…
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Typography Class
I’m going to be teaching a class on typography next week, and here’s how I’m planning the class: after a brief recap of the assigned readings for the day, we’ll do an informal critique exercise in which we look at different examples of typography whose meaning seems to conflict with…
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New(ish) Preprints
I’ve added new preprints in the past few days for the following papers. Enjoy! Designing has no given problems, no given processes, and no given solutions. Jordan Beck, Erik Stolterman (https://osf.io/dz9xr/) A Study of Citation Motivations in HCI Research. Jordan Beck, Bikalpa Neupane, John M. Carroll (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/me8zd/) Managing Conflict in…
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You Can Always Start Designing
Over the past few days, I have heard a few students and colleagues say a variation of the following: I don’t know enough to start designing yet. I want to challenge this idea. I don’t think that there is some threshold of knowledge that must be passed before one can…
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Image-based Reference Management
Here are some true statements. (1) Some of my colleagues share paper copies of interesting, relevant research with me. (2) I find new literature on devices that aren’t mine. (3) Manual entry of new literature is sort of a pain on a mobile device. I want to be able to…
jordan beck, phd 