MIT course: Styles of User Interaction

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Subject: MIT course: Styles of User Interaction
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From: [email protected] (Richard Furuta)

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From: [email protected] (Jan Gray)
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Subject: MIT course: Styles of User Interaction
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I just received this *very* interesting MIT course outline that I just *had*
to share with you...[apologies if this is a repeat]

Jan Gray ([email protected]) University of Waterloo (519) 885-1211 x3870


Styles of User Interaction
Lippman and Kay
Spring Semester

Materials:
25 512K touch-screen Macintoshs running MacSmalltalk.
Any additional LISA's and Macs that might be available.
All will be networked to a file server, laser printer, and
gateway to AMT LAN.

Book by Paul Heckel
Book by Dick Bolt
Misc. papers by well-known user-interactivists

The Macs will be set up in a MacGarden that can double as a classroom ala
Brown. The Smalltalk is *not* Smalltalk-80 but a carefully trimmed version that
is easier to use than the old Smalltalk-72 for kids.

Direction:

The course in intended to be exploratory with the students doing most of the
legwork. As in Heckel's book we will not state hard interactin principles that
have been handed down on RAND tablets from past generations. Rather, the
intent will be to get studets to become designers so they can compare different
interaction styles and then make up their own.

The first part of the semester will be spent trying different interaction styles
now in vogue. MacSmall will have a variety of models to which use interfaces
can be fit, including: browser, word processor, spread-sheet, draw and paint,
animation, and music. The last part, and most student projects, wll be
concerned with two new interaction principles: Agents, and Multi-channel
Interaction.

After the students have done enough to be critical of most approaches, talks by
distinguished user-interaction designers will commence.

Discussion topics will include:
Human factors of displays and controllers
"Modeless" Interaction
Easy To Learn vs. Hard To Use
Doing with Images makes Symbols
User tailored/written software
Agents
Multi-channel interaction