These are courses we offer / have offered for credit at MIT.
Industrial Design Intelligence: A Cognitive Science Approach to Engineering
Ted Selker, Jackie Lee, Ernesto Arroyo
The look, feel and use of objects communicate their value to us. This course applies cognitive science and technology to the industrial design process. The course will introduce prototyping techniques and approaches for objective evaluation as part of the design process. Students will practice evaluating products with mechanical and electronic aspects. The evaluation process will then be applied to creating functioning product prototypes.
This is a project-oriented course that will draw on engineering, aesthetic, and creative skills. The course is geared towards students interested in creating physical products which encompass electronics and computers in order to include them in scenarios. Students will present readings, learn prototyping skills, create a product prototype, and complete a publication style paper. We will mill, cut, mold solder, program and draw our way to evaluating product design.
Context-Aware Computing
Ted Selker, Matthew Hockenberry
This project-based course will teach students to create context-aware and intention- based computing systems. Most computing systems have required people to communicate with them using directives. Students will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and sensors to create computing systems that figure out what to do based on situation. The system’s physical or symbolic actions may be dependent on time, place, or the history of interaction; in other words, dependent upon context. We explore perspectives from machine learning, sensors and effectors, embedded devices, information visualization, philosophy and psychology.
We will see how each treats the problem of context, and discuss the implications for design of context-sensitive hardware and software. Course requirements will include presentations and critiques of class reading from research literature (about 2 papers/week) and a final project including a computer implementation, evaluation and publication-quality paper.
“A View From Mass Ave”: Workshop on the Design of Spatial Applications
Matthew Hockenberry, Ted Selker
Maps have served a variety of purposes throughout history. We are building a theoretical approach that constructs maps focused on the user’s point of view. The workshop focuses on learning about the tools available to build these kinds of applications, and reflect on thoughts from philosophy, urban planning, computer science, design, and geographic information systems. Students in the workshop will be expected to attend lectures from noted speakers and framing sessions where we will go over tools, technologies, and techniques for building spatial applications. There will be friday critique sessions where students will have the opportunity to share their progress, ask questions, and recieve feedback.
The workshop will culminate in a final design competition where the most provacative, interesting, and successful projects will recieve recognition and where the “best of these” as determined by a panel of judges will be considered for the round and flat awards. We believe that the workshop allows students to not only visualize new ways of exploring space but encourages building a real spatial application that embodies these techniques.
Voting Technology: What Has Been and What Can Be
Ted Selker
Whose vote counts in an election? Voting process does affect election results. For the first time in history we are in a position to create technology and processes that can probably allow detection and correction of human error and fraud in voting. Improving voting technology should be central to protecting our democratic process. As well, it can instill confidence in our government and system. Digital technology may even improve our government and process.
Improved voting technology can also transfer to other areas. Solving problems of disenfranchisement of people relative to socioeconomic, physical, and cognitive disabilities in voting can be applied to other universal access problems. Solving problems of security, reliability and integrity in voting can help improve other transaction processing systems. This course will survey voting systems and how they can be improved. We will give broad coverage of user experience, reliability, security and integrity of voting systems. The course will consist of weekly topic areas and lectures from voting technology experts. Topics will follow the largest areas of lost votes and topics of public debate.