Next thursday, HCI graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information will continue their partnership with Mozilla by participating in this fall's Mozilla Labs' University Design Challenge. This challenge asks students to research and design solutions around browsing history: "How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?"

The School of Information is one of four schools from three countries that is taking part in this challenge, and each school will take a slightly different approach. In our initial event we'll introduce students to the challenge, brainstorm and whiteboard ideas, and share them with one another. Then students will have individually or in small groups take their idea to the next level; this might be a series of mock-ups, a video, or even a prototype.

Over the past year, Mozilla and the U of M School of Information have worked together to put on several design jam sessions; and several SI students have submitted their work to Mozilla for review by other design challenge participants and the Mozilla Labs team. These experiences have benefitted SI students in a few ways: they've gotten valuable supplemental design practice, they've made themselves more visible in the design and open source community, and they've had the very exciting opportunity to work closely with and receive feedback from members of the Mozilla Labs team.

The following students' mockups, prototypes and video examples are available online:

• The TabViz team, which originated in SI's Information Visualization class, won the 'Best in Class' award at Mozilla's 2009 Summer Design Challenge. Props to SI students Jakob Hilden, Liz Blankenship, and Kerry Kao.
• Katie McCurdy submitted a mock-up and prototype to the Spring Design Challenge to communicate her ideas about being able see elements of different websites at the same time.
• Maureen Hanratty and Ian Tadashi Moore submitted a flash animation to last fall's Design Challenge (link forthcoming).

For more information on next week's event and to RSVP, check out the facebook event. And check out older posts on the design jams and challenges SOCHI has held in the past year.