Assignments

(All Assignments are subject to change)

Projects
  • Project 1: Ethnography (Example List of Topics)
    Student will group together to perform an ethnography of 10 weeks. Each student is expected to participate an average of four hours a week each person in the group. Each student is also expected to take notes and spend one hour hour a week writing up the results of the ethnography. You can write you notes up as a group or individual, but the total notes and time spent are expected to be the sum of the number of people in the group. For example if there are four people in the group, that is 16 hours of ethnography time plus four hours of write up per week. A list of suggested topics have been provided here.
  • Project 2: Ethnography Design Project
    • Design a digital artifact that would aid of the lives of the group of people you are studying in your ethnography. Make sure you have plenty of mock - ups for the designed application. Your project report should follow the paper writing guide. The deliverables for this project are a report, and a video.
  • Project 3: Haptigo
    • Haptic feedback is a mode of providing information through touch. Wearable fabrics can be effective for communicating with the environment around you. This project has two parts in it: one that is pre-defined, and one that is defined by you. In the predefined part of the project, you are to direct a person through a maze using only tactile directional feedback. You will use wearable Arduino / LilyPad chips that are physically connected to vibro-actuators that are sewn (by you) into clothing, and connect through Bluetooth to an Android phone for controlling it. In the second part of the project, you can use haptic feedback in your own creative way.
  • Final Project
    Implement and test a CHI artifact. We encourage using designs from Project 2 or Project 3. The project group may also propose a new topic instead. Projects are expected to have the following: 
    • Written Report:
      • Motivation - Sufficient motivation for developing the project
      • Related Work - full coverage the previous work
      • Implementation - complete demo - able implementation of the project
      • Evaluation - a mature evaluation of the system developed
      • Results and Discussion - a sophisticated discussion about the results obtained from the evaluation. 
    • A Video:
      • Make a video demo of the project in a graphically pleasing and enjoyable format. An example for a video demonstration - MultimodalRummy link .
      • The video will be presented on Day 29, December 12 1:00 PM and will serve as project presentation.

Conference Paper Reading Assignments
  • Source conferences
    • CHI 2010
    • UIST 2009 & 2010
    • IUI 2009 & 2010
      .
  • Assigned conference paper readings list
  • Additional notes
    • Every student is assigned 25 papers to read. The assignment for each student is listed in the following spreadsheet (your assigned reading is listed in BOLD):
      • CHI Class (Spring 2011) - Paper Readings Assignments
    • Every student would have to write a blog on the papers assigned to each of them. The blogs would be evaluated at the end of every month. The evaluation metric for writing the blogs is listed under:
      • Grading Policy
    • A guide for writing your the blog can be found below and in the Guides section:
      • Guide #1: Writing your blog posts
    • In addition to writing blog posts, students are required to present 3 papers during the lecture hours.
    • The papers cannot be accessed when outside TAMU network. Please use the TAMU VPN or CS VPN to connect to tamu network or access the paper after logging in through library website.

Reading Material
  • Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
    • by Lauren Slater
    • 2008 W.W. Norton & Company
      .
  • Design of Everyday Things
    • by Donald Norman
    • 2002 Basic Books
  • Emotional Design
    • by Donald Norman
  • Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View
    • by Stanley Milgram
    • 2009 Harper Perennial Modern Classics
      • Why We Make Mistakes
        • by Joseph T. Hallinan
        • 2009 Crown Archetype

        • Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
          • by Sudhir Venkatesh
          • 2008 Penguin Press HC, The
        • [Optional] HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works that have Influenced the HCI Community
          • edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald
          • 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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