Designing Creative Technologies

Instructor Information

• Jennifer Jacobs | jmjacobs (at) mat (dot) ucsb (dot) edu | Elings 2215
• Office Hours: Wednesdays 13:00-14:00 by appointment only

Course Description

This course is for Ph.D and Masters students who are interested in designing and building creative technologies for art, design, and engineering applications. The course is structured into three parts. The first part examines theories of human creativity. The second part focuses on creative technology interface and interaction design principles. The third part explores research methods to evaluate creative technologies. The course will be run as a seminar involving discussion of readings and concepts presented in lecture and exploration of human-computer interaction research methodologies. Students will have the opportunity to apply design and evaluation methods from the course towards a current or future creativity support research project.

Course Goals

• Explore models of human creativity across ideation, learning, and collaboration.
• Survey trends and gaps in human computer interaction creativity support research.
• Develop methods of informing technological design by analysis of real-world creative practice.
• Explore practices principles in interaction and interface design for creativity support technologies.
• Develop human evaluation methodologies for creative technologies of your own design.

Course Requirements

Reading Reflections

Students will be assigned weekly readings on creativity theory, HCI creativity support technology, and interaction design. Students are expected to complete the readings and submit a short but thoughtful reflection to the class Github by 10 AM (the morning of) class. Reflections should focus on analysis and response of resonant themes in the reading or comparison or contrast between readings, rather than a summary of the content.

In Class Participation

A large portion of the class will be devoted to discussion of readings and concepts from the lecture, and group critique of student presentations. Students are responsible for actively and thoughtfully contributing to these discussions and critiques.

Course Assignments

In addition to reading reflections, students will be responsible for completing two smaller in-course assignments and one final project for the quarter. Each assignment and final project must be documented in written form (complete with figures), and submitted on the course Github prior to the class on which they are due. Students will also be responsible for presenting the results of these assignments in class. Assignments are detailed here.