CS 4634 – Design of Information
News
This is the home page for CS 4634 (Design of Information), Fall 2011. On this page you will find the most recent announcements for the course. Other course information can be found by clicking on the links to the left.
Announcements:
01/02: REALLY GREAT FINAL EXAMS!
There were a number of outstanding final exam reports. I am pleased that the authors of some of them have allowed me to display them to you:
Part 1: Burke, Liversedge, and Thayer
Part 2: Liversedge
Part 3: Liversedge, Obenauer, and Talley
12/16 (20:30): GRADING COMPLETE - PLEASE CHECK!
Final Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 and the final presentation, demo, and project report have been graded. Have a look at them to make sure that I found your submission.
12/15 (15:40): FINALS GRADING UPDATE - PLEASE CHECK!
I believe all submissions are in. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 have been graded. Have a look at them to make sure that I found your submission. I am working grading the projects so your overall grade is not yet ready.
12/05: TUESDAY - SIGNED RELEASE FORMS AND PRESENTATIONS
If you are planning on submitting your project to the Steger Competition, please bring a signed copy of the release to class on Tuesday -- or submit a scanned signed copy via the Assignment page.
Also, please rehearse your presentations including the demo!
11/29: PLEASE UPDATE THE PROJECT STATUS and BRING YOUR BLOG/JOURNAL ON THURSDAY
You will fill out a short report on the status of your blog/journal at the start of Thursday's class.
11/28: ADDED WAY TO GET AN ECP
Information figures prominently in the recent film about J. Edgar Hoover. Write a short essay (2 to 3 pages) on the role of information and information architecture in the movie. 2 points.
11/17: DO-AT-HOME BLOG/JOURNAL REVIEW
Since I had a printer problem, we were not able to do the blog/journal review in class. The assignment is to answer this: Now that you have completed Homework 5, the Mini-, Pre-Final, which required you to review your blog/journal and use it to illustrate your essay, what would you have done differently with it ? BE SURE TO COPY THE ANSWER TO THIS INTO YOUR BLOG/JOURNAL AS WELL AS POSTING TO THE ASSIGNMENT PAGE.
11/16: THURSDAY'S CLASS
I've swapped topics between 13.B and 15.A, so we will talk about HTML5. We will still do a quick journal review and project status review. So please be sure to bring your blog/journal to class and be sure to update the wiki with your groups hours and % complete inforrmation. On the other hand, you now can listen to "When Patents Attack" over Thanksgiving break.
11/02: BRING YOUR BLOG/JOURNAL ON THURSDAY
You will fill out a short report on the status of your blog/journal at the start of Thursday's class.
10/31: OUT OF THE BOX PRACTICUM ECP's
This was really tough. There were great OOB interaction ideas and a few really clever OOB locations. Team A's idea of a display in the bathrooms of the impact on the environment of each person's visit gets the "location" ECP and Team F's Viewmaster interactor gets the "interaction" ECP.
10/27: OUT OF THE BOX PRACTICUM
Don't forget to e-mail me your out of the box ideas from Thursday's class.
10/23: ECPs FROM CONCEPT PRESENTATIONS
The class favorite was group D (uses QR codes and had a Wizard of Oz demo in the presentation); it was closely followed by group E, "Big Board". Group D was also overwhelmingly popular with all the personas, but for 4 of them it was tied with other choices, so the point was distributed accordingly: A: 0.18, B: 0.09, C: 0.09, D: 0.55, E: 0.09, F: 0, G: 0, H: 0 .
10/20: PRACTICUM
Don't forget to upload your work from Thursday's class.
10/16: "BRANDING" STRATEGIES
I realize that I had planned to discuss "branding" strategies for VTRC-A on Thursday, but forgot. Thinking strategically (that is, top down) about the problem of how to convey a "brand" message about VTRC-A can be done in three ways in this project: through the content, through the appearance of the presentation, or through the way the audience interacts with it -- and these can combine. Of the groups I've met with, few if any have thought of doing a content-first strategy.
10/08: TWO CLASSES TO CONSIDER FOR SPRING 2012
CS 4644 (Creative Computing Studio) is a cool class; some of your fellow students took it last year. It approaches CS problems from a very different perspective. You will work in teams with art students to create interactive works of art.
CS 4984 (Integrating Computational Thinking into Middle School Curriculum) is a special capstone class to research, design, and implement some prototype interactive course software for middle schools students in Henrico County (suburban Richmond). Since the idea is to teach "computational thinking", you will help define what that means.
9/28: HCI CENTER OPEN HOUSE
Come visit the HCI Center in the CRC on Friday during our open house, 4 to 6 PM. This is a great opportunity to see some ways of presenting research. The CRC shuttle bus leave from in front of Newman Library every 15 minutes. The Center (and the CS Department offices) are in VTKW II, 2202 Kraft Drive, next to the pond with the fountain.
9/27: TEAM FORMATION
The confusion about team formation categories and rules has been resolved. Please begin to talk with your classmates about working together. The rules are posted on the Project page.
9/26: A FEW OBSERVATIONS ABOUT ZILLOW.COM NARRATIVE
Have a look at the various narratives that were developed from zillow.com. They mostly take the form of house-hunting stories; some read like ads for zillow as a service. Here are a few other ideas for narrative presentation of zillow.com information: a police report of a raid on a crack house, story about where you grew up, and a description of a walk down a street.
9/25: XML SHAKESPEARE EXTRA CREDIT POINT
The overwhelming class favorite project (and winner of the class ECP) is Alex Obenauer for his "Emotion Analyzer". The other class favorites were Lee Hunter's "Shakespeare Status", Sarah Hendon's "Word Cloud Creator", Joe Liversedge's "Merely Players", and Wes Thayer's "Soliloquy" (which I found to be an imaginative mining program and have given him the ECP).
9/20: XML SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
On Thursday, HW 3 is due. We will show ALL the projects so please bring a laptop ready to run a demo of your system. We will have 3 projectors so set-up can happen while others are presenting. We will go in alphabetical order.
9/16: ADDITIONAL PROJECT INFORMATION
We have registered received information from the competition organizers: general, jury, floor plan, and wall detail. If you have questions about how to understand the plan documents, please e-mail Professor Harrison.
9/14: LETTER OF INTENT FILED
We have registered the intent of this class to participate in the Charles W Steger Design Competition for the VTRC-A building information display.
9/08: BRING YOUR JOURNALS TODAY
We are going to do a quick journal review today.
9/07: CLIENT AND AUDIENCE RESEARCH GROUPS
Based on the sheet you filled in yesterday, I have posted the group rosters on the "Project" page. Please verify the list. I made an executive decision yesterday adding students to groups 5 & 6,I believe. Based on corrections sent me by a member of Group 1, the two absent people belonged in Group 1 and three others did not. Please e-mail me any corrections.
9/07: HW3: COMMODITY, FIRMNESS AND DELIGHT 
The basic grading of HW3: XML Shakespeare, will be on the three elements of design that Vitruvius identified: Commodity (how well it serves a need), Firmness (how well it is engineered), and Delight. As to "serving a need", HW3 asks you to do something interesting. So "serving a need" will be interpreted as "how well does it meet the spec you claim in your wiki post". That spec can be fairly useless in a classical sense of the term; it could even be frivolous, if it is engaging.
9/03: OVERLOOKED INFORMATIION EXTRA CREDIT
We have not two but three winners! the class evenly split between pictures 23 ("No Smoking within 25 feet of Building" @ East AJ Residence Hall") and 29 ("Human face") -- both with 5 votes. I awarded picture 32 ("Patent notice on outdoor trashcan"). FWIW, this is the first time I have awarded my point to a picture of more or less obscure text. Great job everybody! The rest of the votes: #8: 4 votes; #5: 3 votes; #31: 2 votes
9/03: EMAIL PROBLEMS
I seem to have an over-active junk mail filter. I just discovered a number of messages from students that were sent over the last week. My apologies -- and if you think I might have missed an important message or question, please send again.
8/30: CLARIFICATION ON HOMEWORK 1
What is meant by "overlooked" is that information in the environment that is visible, but you believe your fellow students, especially those in this class, might not have noticed.