in light of the marketplace’s rapid shift from desktop to mobile computing.

His proposal—a “designerly” orientation to mobile HCI design that foregrounds complementary development of both artifacts and enriched understandings of the context(s) surrounding those artifacts—draws on Christopher Alexander’s framing of design as an enterprise of matching form to context. While variations on this idea have long been present within the ubiquitous computing research community, Kjeldskov’s argument that the traditional cyclical design process may not be the best fit for highly contextually dependent design work has been useful for thinking about different ways to organize the efforts of students in my research group and for supporting both generative (built/designed) exploration and reflective thinking (analysis) in the context of messy, information-rich environments.

Advanced Avionics Handbook
By Federal Aviation
Administration (2009)

Despite a busy schedule on

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design By Bill Buxton (2007) Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook By Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale, Nicolai Marquardt, and Bill Buxton (2011) Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide By

particularly enjoyable to remix the content of both books with contemporary ubicomp readings to create weekly sketching assignments aimed at pushing students to effectively communicate visions about how emerging mobile and wearable systems could be designed to address real-world problems.

Many of the informatics students enrolled at IU’s Indianapolis campus also work as full-time UX professionals here in the city. I’ve been working through several of Rosenfeld Media’s professional UX books, including

Prototyping and Storytelling for User Experience, with the aim of integrating more practitioner-oriented content into my courses. I’ve found these well-designed, topically focused softcovers to be a great match for these students’ needs, since they include a variety of step-by-step tutorials, surveys of software tools commonly used for sketching and pre-visualization, checklists, and relatable case studies.

Mobile Interactions in
Context: A Designerly Way
Toward Digital Ecology
By Jesper Kjeldskov (2014)

This book is a recent addition to my library, prompted by a flurry of interest from colleagues shortly after its (recent) publication. In it, Kjeldskov argues the need for re-examining the established user-centered design model

Todd Zaki Warfel (2009)

Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design By Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks (2010)

Buxton’s book, Sketching
User Experiences, presents
an accessible and engaging
case for the fundamental
importance of design
thinking throughout the
research and development
pipeline. As I continue to
develop a combination of
undergraduate and graduate
courses in prototyping
interactive systems, I find
myself regularly revisiting
his book and incorporating
his colorful case studies into
my lectures. I also frequently
use the companion
workbook, developed by
my former colleagues at
the University of Calgary,
as a primary textbook—a
primer on visual
communication—
for these
courses. I’ve
found it

Steve Voida

Specs Focus: Design and evaluation of novel interaction techniques to help minimize information overload

Base: Indiana University, Indianapolis, U.S.

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