This is a list of my recent major academic and industrial teaching activities.
This course introduces the concept of Design Patterns for HCI. Instead of following the established notion of design patterns as it has recently evolved in software engineering, however, it will go back to the original sources of the pattern idea in architecture.
I have decided to create this new course to teach students about the potential of patterns for HCI. It will be held in the upcoming Spring quarter for the first time. Please see my CS377C Home Page for more information.
I have been teaching this course together with Gayle Curtis this Winter 2000/2001 quarter, and will teach it again on my own in the upcoming Spring quarter. The course developed out of the Apple Design Project, and has been offered at Stanford for many years. It addresses students in a variety of programs, including Computer Science (both at the M.Sc. and B.Sc. level), Symbolic Systems, Learning Design and Technology and others. It teaches students essential design skills such as brainstorming and sketching, and introduces interaction design concepts such as scenarios, task analysis, prototyping, and testing. The course is organized around a series of individual and group projects defined and carried out by students, and they are required to document their progress in an extensive idea log. Students implement prototypes using Macromedia Director or similar tools, and the course is accompanied by a Director lab to learn using that authoring tool. Throughout the quarter, guest speakers from industry and academia give their perspectives on the various topics of the course. This year, we have changed and updated some parts of the course and the assignments, to reflect current developments in HCI design.
Please see our CS247a Home Page for more information.
This is a course I designed in 1998 for first- and second-year undergraduates in Computer Science who are specializing in user interface design and interactive media at the University of Ulm in Germany. The course covers issues such as human information processing, user interface design principles, prototyping techniques, and evaluation and user testing. I planned and held this course in cooperation with a graphic designer who covered issues such as designing for dynamic media. Practical exercises, from graphic studies with pencil and paper to prototyping with Macromedia Director, supplement the lectures. It was held in 1998, 1999, and 2000, and now serves as the foundation for a similar course held by other colleages at Ulm.
This seminar was offered to undergraduate Computer Science students at the University of Linz in the winter term 1999/2000. I gave students HCI fields to survey, such as user interface patterns, earcons and auditory icons, or tangible bits. The seminar was held in the form of a conference, to also teach students how to write scientific papers and give good presentations.
From 1999 until 2000, I have been giving three-day short courses about the basics of usability twice a year during the Spring and Fall Academy Days at the University of Ulm. These events aimed to offer scientific topics to elderly people in an understandable and useful way. In my course, I covered basic concepts of user interface theory and practice, and gave participants some models to reason about design for usability in their everyday environments. The ultimate goal was to empower people to speak up for themselves when it comes to usability of consumer devices, public systems etc.
From 1995 until 2000, I have been teaching courses for the Siemens Training Centers in Frankfurt, Vienna and elsewhere on a regular basis. Topics included Unix (introduction and basic administration), Principles of Client/Server Computing, OSF/Motif application development, and programming in C.
Jan Borchers <borchers@stanford.edu> • Last modified Mar 22, 2001 12:51 PM