Course Schedule: Fall 2005

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research. The emphasis will be on methods of collecting and interpreting many kinds of data about real-world user activities and practices and translating them into design decisions. The course includes hands-on practice with a number of major user experience research methods, including heuristic evaluation; observation; interviews, surveys and focus groups. The emphasis will be on naturalistic/ethnographic (qualitative) methods, but we will also address major quantitative methods. Finally, we will discuss methods of bringing user experience research into the design process.

This course is appropriate for both 1st and 2nd-year MIMS students, and for students from other departments with a strong interest in user experience research, with the instructor's permission. Students will complete at least one major group project related to needs assessment and evaluation. Second-year MIMS students may use this project to meet their capping project requirement.

The design and presentation of digital information. Use of graphics, animation, sound, visualization software, and hypermedia in presenting information to the user. Methods of presenting complex information to enhance comprehension and analysis. Incorporation of visualization techniques into human-computer interfaces.

Computer visualization is used widely in scientific and engineering disciplines to help people understand the systems they study, but has only recently begun to be applied to general information. This course will focus on the use of visualization to enhance comprehension and analysis of structured information such as text collections, networked systems like the Web, work processes, etc. For examples of what computerized visualization is see: http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/atlas/atlas.html

Much of the relevant work is new and still being researched. For this reason, many of the lectures will be given by guest speakers with expertise in specialized subareas.

Readings and lectures will cover basic visualization principles and tools, and relevant work in the new field of information visualization. Students will gain hands-on experience with existing tools.

All students are expected to participate in class discussion, write a short survey paper or design a graphical presentation, and do a project. The project will consist either of creating or enhancing a visualization system or technique, or conducting a user study to evaluate a system or technique.

This course is targeted to both SIMS and computer science students. Students must be willing to read papers that contain some advanced math and must be willing to augment existing programs (using either a scripting language or a standard programming language).

The “traditional” approach to strategic planning doesn’t work for industries in the midst of revolutionary change brought about by disruptive technologies—and every industry is in the midst (or soon will be) of such a change.

This course will define a pragmatic approach to strategic planning for companies facing major transformations of their industries and those of their suppliers and customers.

We will begin with a review of the basic theories of strategic planning and its limitations. We will then focus on a few key industries and disruptive technologies that are remaking them, and ask how winning companies recognize the change and know what to do with it.

Topics include:

• Lessons of the Industrial Revolution: Rules for Revolutionaries
• The Information Revolution: The Next Phase
• The Three Stages of Industry Transformation: Efficiency to Exchange to Emergence
• The Information Supply Chain: Turning Data into Products and Services
• Information Assets: The Physics of Invisible Capital
• Perpetual Strategy: The Portfolio Approach to Planning
• Eight Execution Problems: From Obstacles to Catalysts

Readings will include a mix of theoretical and practical, with some Harvard cases and some non-traditional texts.

Three hours of lecture per week for five weeks. XML, with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for metadata and models, is the key enabling technology for information services and document-centric business models that use the Internet and its family of protocols. This course introduces XML syntax, styles and transformations, and schema languages. It balances conceptual topics with practical skills for designing and implementing conceptual models as XML schemas.

Much of the material in this course was formerly part of Document Engineering, which is taught in the Spring semester; XML Foundations is now a pre-requisite. Making XML Foundations a separate course allows students who want to learn XML to do so without taking Document Engineering. In addition, teaching XML separately from Document Engineering enables that class to dig deeper into conceptual modeling and model-based application design.

Substantial investments are being made by many individuals and firms in the development and distribution of open source software and other information artifacts. This seminar will consider economic and business rationales for adoption of open source modes of production and dissemination and will consider how open source projects might be made sustainable by looking into the social and organizational dynamics used to coordinate their activities. The seminar will examine licensing models widely used by open source developers, which generally grant rights to use and modify licensed information on condition that users agree to carry over to derivative works the same license restrictions imposed by the open source developer. For software, this includes free publication of source code. Open source licensing models are being adapted to apply to more than just computer software, such as databases of scientific information, certain biotechnology innovations, and music. Whether the metaphor of open source has wider social ramifications as a modality of community governance will also be given attention.

The seminar will explore the technical, social and cultural aspects of informative objects in any and all forms (aka “documents”). We will adopt three strategies:

• Analyze examples of powerful documents (i.e. having social, intellectual, and/or emotional impact) in politics, business, subcultures, sciences, religion, and the arts.
• Read and discuss selected literature on the "nature" of documents, past, present and in future.
• Imagine and design possible new or emerging kinds of document and speculatively consider their likely uses, impacts, and relationship with existing genres.

Documents and their role in society cannot be understood unless they are examined concurrently from three perspectives:

• Technical / technological forms and constraints;
• Social roles and uses, intended and otherwise; AND
• Humanities: meaning, perception, representation, language, cultural codes.

All three are required to comprehend the complex character of documents being physical, social and cultural all at the same time.

In “reading sessions” there will be discussions based on reading of texts by Jay David Bolter, Neil Gershenfeld, Brenda Laurel, John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, David Levy, Bernd Frohmann, Michael Buckland, Niels W. Lund, Roger T. Pedauque, and Herbert A. Simon.

In “studio” sessions students are asked to present ideas and sketches of documents in a broad sense like a website, a zine, a poster, a poem, an official form and last but not least kinds of documents which never have been seen before, new forms of artistic documents. The main question will be to imagine and outline a number of options for making a satisfactory document according to social and cultural criteria as well as possible technical solutions. One solution and some technical means may function in principle, but challenge one or more of the social and cultural criteria and vice versa. Some documents may, as a whole, work better within an analogue environment instead of a digital environment, highlighting the discussion of new and old media.

Some of the sessions will be connected online with a similar course at the University of Tromso in Norway, as part of an international distributed document lab, The Document Academy.

Instructor: Visiting Professor Niels Windfeld Lund, is professor in Documentation Studies, University of Tromsø, Norway. He has a M.A. in History and Ethnology (University of Aarhus, Denmark) and a D.E.A. in History and Civilisation (L'Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris). He taught a course in "Documents in Society" in SIMS in 2001, and organizes The Document Academy / SIMS conferences.