Events

On October 13, SOCHI held our first-ever "Ignite" event, where students were invited to speak for 5 minutes about a topic of their choice. This event was modeled after the official Ignite events, where speakers are given 20 slides and slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, whether they are ready or not! We found that this was a great format for students to keep it short and simple in talking about topics they are passionate about.

We had 9 awesome speakers for the event: some talked about lessons learned during their summer internships (including for several startups), some shared advice with fellow students about job searching and independent studies, one reported on a recent conference, and one gave a rousing talk on affordances. We encourage you to check out them all, as each speaker much to share. Enjoy!

Speakers:
Katie McCurdy: “Most Important Things I Learned at the 2009 Design Research Conference”
Laura Rodrian: “Professional for Hire: Making the Most of Your Job Search”
Noah Liebman: “The Death of Touch: Tactile Affordances in an Age of Multitouch”
Jeremy Canfield: “Phonagle, the Untold (short) Story”
Debra Lauterbach: “Choose Your Own Adventure: Extending Your Learning Outside the Classroom”
Eunice Shin: "Working for a Brand Experience Agency"
Wentao Wang: “HCI Work in Startups”
Jo Pu: “100 Days of Summer at Pitney Bowes” - slides only available on Slideshare
Ami Arnault: “Lessons Learned from Working for an Early-stage Startup” (presentation not recorded)

Playlist of presentations on Vimeo: (or click here to go to Vimeo)

All School of Information students, alumni, faculty and staff are invited to get the year started right this Friday, September 11th at Dominick's!

SOCHI has arranged an SI-only gathering at Ann Arbor's favorite backyard patio from 6-9pm. We are looking forward to seeing many old friends and new faces. Stop by anytime! Just look for the section marked off for SI.

If you're new to Ann Arbor, Dominick's is located just South of the Law Quad (or two blocks Southwest of West Hall), on Monroe Street.

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.

Team TabViz, Jakob Hilden, Liz Blankenship and Kerry Kao, have won the 'Best in Class: Innovation' prize at Mozilla's recent Summer Design Challenge.

The trio began this project as part of their Information Visualization class at the University of Michigan School of Information in 2009. Liz and Jakob have now graduated, and Kerry will soon also complete her M.S. in Information with a specialization in HCI in 2010.

Congratulations to the TabViz team! You make us proud!

Mozilla Labs Summer 2009 Design Challenge was announced today. The theme for the challenge is

Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?

To participate all you need to do is make a mockup and a video explaining it (for more details go to the challenge website here). We highly encourage SI students to participate. It's great way to get your designs noticed by the UX community.

Source: Flickr

Chris and I were lucky enough to be able to attend the Internet User Experience conference going on here in Ann Arbor this week. There are speakers here from local and national UX and technology companies talking about the latest trends and research in UX for the Internet. Here are some notes from the sessions and what we learned.

SI 635 today had Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP and current employee of Yahoo, as a guest speaker. Lerdorf spoke about the topic of PHP - Then, Now and the Future, a look at how PHP got to where it is today and the impact it has had on the Web.

After telling about his interesting history of growing up in Greenland and living in various places worldwide, Lerdorf talked about how he was first attracted to technology with the advent of the web and Mosaic in 1993.

This week Lena Mamykina a PhD candidate at the Human Centered Computing program of the Georgia Institute of Technology spoke about her work creating ubiquitous computing applications for diabetes management. While most research on healthcare monitoring focuses solely on data capture, Mamykina's applications allow individuals to reflect on the data and learn from their experiences, increasing the patient's feelings of self-efficacy.

A few weeks ago, SOCHI held a design jam with TechSmith to explore new ways to organize and share content on Screencast.com. Barb Hernandez, UX Manager at TechSmith, recently wrote a blog post on the Screencast.com blog summarizing the design jam and asking users for feedback regarding our ideas. There are also more pictures posted! Check it out here: http://blog.screencast.com/2009/03/u-of-m-school-of-information-d.html

SI HCI student Katie McCurdy was selected last month to participate in the Mozilla Spring Design Challenge. On her blog she wrote about a recent tutorial session on Open Source Design by Mozilla Director of Design Josh Slater.