Books & People

Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel & Ulrich Weinberg: Design Thinking (04/14/2009)

The School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany was founded to provide a further study program at HPI. Eighteen months after the school was founded, its first report is now available. In some 200 pages, Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel, and Ulrich Weinberg – the initiators of the school – describe how the school came about, what content the program covers, and the core elements of the design thinking method. They also detail examples of projects and offer an outlook on future developments.

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Dana Chisnell, Jeffrey Rubin: Handbook of usability testing (2nd Ed.) (04/02/2009)

Whether its software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants – no, expects – your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. You'll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your products usability, and more.
(From book cover, adapted)

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Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman & Nathan Bos (Eds.): Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (03/04/2009)

The book, Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, edited by Olson, Zimmerman, and Bos collects contributions from members of the Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project. This project was set up to advance the "science of collaboratories" (SOC), as well as give practical advice and enable "users with a need for collaboratory infrastructure ... to create successful collaboratories on their own." The book can be regarded as a consolidated project summary. It includes numerous case studies and project presentations as well as articles that aim to increase the understanding of collaboratories. According to the editors, "the challenges and rewards of collaboration that take place over space and time, approaches for overcoming the difficulties and evaluating the outcomes of such collaborative work, and conceptual frameworks for exploring and analyzing distributed scientific collaboration are the topics that are explored in detail throughout this book."

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Book ReviewS In Preparation

• Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen & Steven Jacobs (2009). Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed) • Preliminary review page
• Graham Pullin (2009). Design Meets Disability. The MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0262162555 • Preliminary review page

Graham Pullin: Design Meets Disability (04/21/2009)

IIn Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin shows us how design and disability can inspire each other. In the Eameses' work there was a healthy tension between cut-to-the-chase problem solving and more playful explorations. Pullin offers examples of how design can meet disability today. Why, he asks, shouldn't hearing aids be as fashionable as eyewear? What new forms of braille signage might proliferate if designers kept both sighted and visually impaired people in mind? Can simple designs avoid the need for complicated accessibility features? Can such emerging design methods as "experience prototyping" and "critical design" complement clinical trials?

Pullin also presents a series of interviews with leading designers about specific disability design projects, including stepstools for people with restricted growth, prosthetic legs (and whether they can be both honest and beautifully designed), and text-to-speech technology with tone of voice. When design meets disability, the diversity of complementary, even contradictory, approaches can enrich each field.
(From book cover, adapted)

Graham Pullin (2009). Design Meets Disability. The MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0262162555

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Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel & Ulrich Weinberg: Design Thinking (in German) (02/25/2009)

In multidisciplinary teams astoundingly creative processes can be stimulated. But how can this be accomplished? The authors, including SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, propose to use Design Thinking, a groundbreaking method to spur innovation. In their book of the same name, Design Thinking, they demonstrate how you can think creatively and in a user-oriented way and thus are able to create innovative, market-oriented products. The method is comprised of the following steps:

• Understand: Analyze the problem and its environment
• Comprehend: Observe users and define starting points for innovation
• Visualize: Think visually in the whole team
• Solve: Build prototypes that users can put their hands on
• Test: Check products jointly with users

Design Thinking – the first book about the Design Thinking method – combines the craft of engineers with creativity in an impressing manner.
(From book advertisement, translated and adapted)

Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel & Ulrich Weinberg (2009). Design Thinking. mi-Wirtschaftsbuch. ISBN-10: 3868800131, ISBN-13: 978-3868800135

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Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen & Steven Jacobs: Designing the User Interface (5th Edition) (02/20/2009)

The much-anticipated fifth edition of the all-time classic textbook Designing the User Interface is a totally updated resource with extensive fresh material and references in every chapter. The opening more ambitiously positions user interfaces as the critical determinant of consumer product and professional tool success. The authors have also been getting bolder in claiming HCI's role for successes such as cell phones, iPhones, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Similarly in the afterword, they take on the concerns of social impact and eight enduring controversies in our field such as user control versus autonomous agents and 2D versus 3D visualizations. The authors use a full page wordle display for each chapter opening – these displays really show that each chapter is about users but each has a distinct set of terms, wonderfully rendered by Jonathan Fienberg's clever program wordle.
(From Ben Shneiderman, pers. comm., adapted)

Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen & Steven Jacobs (2009). Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed). Pearson Addison-Wesley. ISBN-10: 0321537351, ISBN-13: 978-0321537355 1 • To be published in March 2009

See the book in the book list... • Overview of all featured books • Book Website • Review in preparation

Kim Goodwin: Designing for the Digital Age (02/05/2009)

Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. Designing for the Digital Age addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.
(From book description, adapted)

Kim Goodwin (2009). Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. Wiley. ISBN-10: 0470229101, ISBN-13: 978-0470229101 • To be published in March 2009

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Hiroshi IshIi (07/03/2009)

Hiroshi Ishii is a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. Ishii joined the MIT Media Laboratory in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group to pursue a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits." His team seeks to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information and computation. Since July 2002, he has also co-directed the Thing That Think Consortium at the MIT Media Lab.

Ishii and his students have presented their vision of "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, industrial design, and media art venues including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, and Ars Electronica, emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. In 2006 ACM SIGCHI elected Ishii to the CHI Academy recognizing his substantial contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interactions through the creation of new genre called "Tangible User Interfaces."
(From biography, adapted)

Bio: web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/bio.html
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John Maeda (07/03/2009)

John Maeda is a renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to integrate technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century synthesis of creativity and innovation.

Maeda is the current President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Formerly, he was professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught media arts and sciences for 12 years and served as associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab. Maeda has published four books, his most recent being The Laws of Simplicity (review).

Maeda's early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining skilled computer programming with sensitivity to traditional artistic concerns. As a digital artist, Maeda has exhibited in well-received one-man shows in London, New York and Paris. His work is in the permanent collections of the several museums.

In 2008 Maeda was named one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine. In 2001 he earned the National Design Award in the US; in 2002, the Mainichi Design Prize in Japan; and in 2005, the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize in Germany.
(From RISD bio, adapted)

Bio (RISD): www.risd.edu/president/maeda.html
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Gary M. Olson (01/23/2009)

Gary M. Olson is professor emeritus in the School of Information and professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology. During his career at the School of Information, he was also the Paul M. Fitts Collegiate Professor of Human Computer Interaction. Olson's research interests are in the areas of applied cognitive science, particularly human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Specifically, he is working on topics in the area of computer support for collaborative activities, particularly when conducted at a distance. He has conducted both laboratory and field studies of teams carrying out various forms of complex intellectual activities. A major current interest is the design and evaluation of collaboratories to support distributed science and engineering.

Olson has published more than 80 scientific papers, and edited three books, the most recent one being Scientific Collaboration on the Internet. Together with his wife Judy, Olson received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.
(From bio on Olson's SI homepage, adapted)

Bio: www.si.umich.edu/people/faculty-detail.htm?sid=77
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