UNCC DesComp Ideas

Ideas Seminar – Mary Lou Maher

Date: August 6, 2013

Professor Mary Lou Maher started off by providing a brief introduction and a precise description about her work area. She delves into a broad area of design computing, especially in design computing from Human-Computer Interaction(HCI) and collaborative technologies that enhance creativity and support designers. She talks about her research topics including designing tangible computing for creativity, tangible user interface and design crowdsourcing. Tangible user interface relates new HCI techniques to the needs of creative designers using tabletop system and augmented reality systems and etc. Crowdsourcing design involves not only shared representations and communication, but also what motivates people to participate in design challenges.

Then, she talks about tangible computing with gesture, grasping, and the use of physical objects as integral parts of interaction design. Comparing graphic user interfaces with tangible user interfaces shows that this change in perception and action changes cognition – providing opportunities for designing digital environments that have a dramatically different impact on how we think and interact (http://maryloumaher.net/). And I could learn a lot about tangible computing devices such as siftables, AR toolkit, the Samsung Pixelsense tabletop computer, and Microsoft Kinect from reading her paper.

I was sitting in her research lab and playing with many tangible computing devices. I though one of the most indispensable used tools in today’s society is the computer. Computer and human are bound up each other. The recent research trends in design computing has been proposed to represent more concrete expression of the intimacy between human and computers in a way to search for methods which human and technology can grow together. There is a lot of computing devices as well as computer. With technology getting better, we are getting rid of the physical hardware buttons from our electronics and substituting them with touch screen. People are rapidly switching to tablet and get used to touch-based system. Using this device effectively, I think various studies of design computing are needed to common understanding that ‘easy-to-use’, ‘easy-to-learn’ and ‘intuitive’ interfaces should be beneficial to users. In this sense, Professor Mary Lou Maher’s researches are very interesting to me. The visualization was easy to understand and focused on creativity. I believe understanding people’s gesture and action is extremely important to create intelligent computer technologies. Since the final user of any computer and tangible devices is human, it’s very important to focus on the human side of the design.