Feedback to Veronica on research present

Feedback to Veronica on research presentation Reaction to Bloks studies: 

I think there are some interesting ideas here that could be related to larger theoretical constructs (and that’s where I think you should go strategically. Whether you want to make contributions to pure theory or be respected as an excellent practitioner in HCI, I think it’s helpful to be in dialogue with theory. (Following this thought would suggest looking at courses that you might be able to count toward your MSCS, but also engage deeply with ideas from anthropology, art, comm, philosophy. The MSCS has a lot of flexibility.) If you wanted to go further in the direction of design research, I think there’s a lot here in thinking about affordances and formal design (as a complement to Stanford’s primarily user-centric design approach). This  would let you start to 

It feels to me like a lot of the semiotic ideas we use for analyzing symbolic meaning come ultimately from literary theory. Action knowledge or spatial knowledge might connect to aesthetic theory in interesting ways. In particular, how does an interface perform framing, and how does an interface set up figure/ground relationships. For example, the problem you included in your white paper makes me wonder about how the interface encourages users to frame it. There seems to be an emphasis on getting-to-the-end, which might be shaping how users think of the available actions and the intermediate goals or obstacles. (And of these—the obstacles/board/state, and the action space, which is figure and which is ground?) you’ve probably been over all these ideas—and they’re the kind of thing I think Dor is really excellent with. 

What I’m most interested to hear, though, is what interests you the most. Have you found a thread you want to follow? I know you’re interested in computational thinking, but what about it? For a lot of reasons, this is an important time to be thinking about your trajectory.

Courses

The first course that comes to mind to recommend isn’t taught anymore: Terry Winograd’s Phenomenological Foundations of Cognition, Language, and Computation (http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs378/). 

Frank Bentley’s Understanding Users (cs377u) was the best HCI class I took—highly recommended as a rigorous introduction to using quantitative methods to understand what users are doing with your product after you have created it (as opposed to most user-centered design taught at Stanford, which focuses on developing a product). You’ll find the course full of overzealous future startup exploitees, but if you come in with some solid research questions (and, ideally, a partner also from social sciences), it can be a really good experience. 

I’ve found it a really rewarding experience to do participatory design with teenagers, and middle-school students. If you’re able to get a webapp up and running (or want to learn), I think it’s a great way to explore ideas. If you want to dabble in this, GMS’s intersession is a great way to do it. You go pitch an idea to the whole school, and then around a dozen girls sign up and you work with them for 5 days, 3 hours a day. This is where unfold.studio was born! 

In the past, I’ve done intersessions on: electric fashion (etextiles),      unfold.studio 

    hack gms (designing and building a webapp in a week (it was an interactive message-board for after school)

    electrosonic petting zoo (building instruments with MaKey MaKey connected to Scratch, then rehearsing and performing a song)

 I’d be happy to make introductions if interested.