Enlightened Trial and Error

In 1952, Grace Hopper's compiler opened the door to thousands of new software developers. But until a few years ago, only experts could create interactive media. Today, millions of high-school students maintain custom Facebook pages. Our group's research goal is to create the tools that will enable design generalists and lead users, not just technology experts and engineers, to design interactive systems for the next era of pervasive computing. What kinds of systems can enable people to be able to design a personal health monitor or full-body game controller? There are three main thrusts to our research. The first is design tools for pervasive computing - enabling people to create interfaces that support the richness of human bodily expression and more tightly integrate the physical and computational worlds. Second, our work introduces programming by physical demonstration, enabling designers to leverage their tacit knowledge about the physical world to specify sensor-based interactions through combined direct manipulation and pattern recognition. Third, despite its drawbacks, many users today develop software by copying and modifying existing examples. Yet current software tools are largely ignorant of design-by-modification. Our recent work introduces techniques for creating interfaces analogically by sampling elements from existing designs.

In this talk, we will present an overview of the tools and applications we developed in these three areas and reflect on our design process itself - how we go about observing, prototyping, and building interaction design tools.