Topics
The weekly chronicles of CHI
- Selfiecity: “investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods.”
- Project Tango: “5” phone containing customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment.”
- WordPress’ ‘fantastic’ Flounder theme: “a flat, minimally styled theme for bloggers which features colorful support for post formats and a clean, responsive layout.”
The assignment
- Designing a student app from concept to market.
Analysis
- Brainstorm
- Persona
- Storyboard
Pros
- Teams of three persons seem an ideal fit between manpower and organization.
- Huge overlap with the simultaneous course Usability Design, but I personally prefer Userinterfaces. The course is more dynamic due to quick alternation between theory and practice (perhaps because the group is much smaller). The fact we really going to deploy and ship an application is a real plus (and a leftdown for the other course).
- Excellent balance between work and breaks.
- Interactive lessons + participation of the students.
- It’s not a textbook oriented course which has no added value of attending.
- The whole picture makes sense.
Cons
- Small overlap with the course Product Innovation and Industrial Marketing which isn’t a software-oriented course.
- Blogging is kind of boring. The prof told us that last year there was a team that blogged exceptionally nearly two hours a week. I’m not getting the ‘exceptional’ part and hope that the amount of work aswell as the amount of time for blogging will decrease in the next weeks. But we must admit that some comments we received are valuable and contain some interesting point of views.
- Blogging takes long, reading blogs too. But we must admit again that some posts we read are valuable and contain some interesting point of views.
- The lessons would be more attractive and the progression would be faster if there were fewer teams. For example: the pitch was interesting, but after a few groups our attention got distracted which is harmful for the feedback for the last teams.
anarCHI 
I agree, blogging takes long and reading blogs takes long too, but I really think blogging is a plus of this course: it really lets you, while writing, thinking about the decisions you made and compare those decisions to other groups and as such rethink your decisions. I believe it could result in better decisions and better apps in the end.
I strongly agree with this ^
I really don’t agree with your first con actually, Product Innovation and Industrial Marketing was a course about developing (innovative) products, so you’ll probably see some an overlap with that course in many other ‘developing courses’. I don’t get why this (rather small) overlap is placed at your cons, while the overlap with Usability Design is on your pro side?
From the theoretic part we’ve seen so far: Brainstorming, Persona and Storyboards. Storyboards weren’t seen in PIM, but Brainstorming and Persona were all seen in my opinion more formely and structured. But for the practical part of this course its of course inavoidable and not a problem.
Perhaps the part of UD says something about UD itself. I clearly stated the added value of UI over UD so that seems a pro to me?
I agree that there are a lot of groups, I too lost some of my attention towards the end of the pitches. However, I don’t see a solution for this… You can’t forbid anyone to take the course.
Not all cons can be solved.
Or there’re two solutions as for some other courses:
1) UI in semester 1 and 2
2) Write a motivitation as for the course Leadership and Strategic Management (http://onderwijsaanbod.kuleuven.be/2013/syllabi/e/H09P4AE.htm) and you can get one of the N available places. (Not really handy for an obligatory course for HCI specialization).
“Not all cons can be solved.” I like that attitude 😉
Another alternative is to not have everyone pitch to everyone, but to divide the class in smaller groups of groups. The extreme would be to have pairs of groups pitch to one another…
I’m also in the UD course and I also prefer – for now – this course. We had our first meeting yesterday, and only 50% showed up… one of the side effects if you’re working with big groups (6 people).
Then you’ll have something to write in your secret UD diary? 😉
Kinda glad we don’t have to deal with peer-assessments in this course, although I admit it has its use in extreme situations.
PS. Who knows 😉 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT1Dis4i9pA
PPS. Nah, not that big of a scumbag to punish someone after only 1 (or 2 or 3) missteps.
I only mentioned writing that you and the other two did all the work by yourselves. You added the punishing part :d .
You could also see it as part of the course to learn to skim blog posts efficiently. Especially in this domain, you will see that you can find some innovative ideas from blogs.
I agree that skimming a blog is a nice skill to learn; however, a clear title might actually help with that… I don’t really get the title of this post…
Tango? It just sounded great (Ref.: It takes two to tango)
Yes all of this blogging and reading can be a bit annoying, but you also see the advantages of reading other peoples opinions. I think it’s a good exercise to learn how to communicate your ideas with “the world”.
This post is somewhat strangely ordered. Topics, pros and cons (pros and cons of what?). Some introduction would be nice.
No inspiration, looking for a ghostwriter or some bunch of monkeys who can write something else than Shakespeare