On Nov 8th I was a guest lecturer at the “Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces” class at UC Berkeley. It’s a physical computing course, about “a new approach to HCI which focuses on the physical interaction with computational media.” The class has both lecture and lab components. The lab section is hands-on experimenting with novel physical interfaces, using Arduino as the core. So of course I have a great fondness for the course.
The talk itself was a sort of summary of the things we’ve been pondering at ThingM. If you’re already familiar with the stuff Mike and I have been talking about for the last several months, there’s not much new. But for me it was interesting to put it all together into one package and attempt to construct a narrative that threads it all together. The talk covered:
- Computation as Material
- Smart Interface Components
- Reversible Hacking
- Technology Sketches
- Informational Objects
Before my talk I got to see the in-progess work of the students’ final projects to create new kinds of musical instruments using a variety of input devices, Arduino, Processing, and so on. It was great. I was invited to be a guest lecturer by fellow Sketcher Kimiko Ryokai, an assistant professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Thank you, Kimiko, for letting me be a part of your class and to meet your students. The class was 40 strong and it’s obvious there’s a lot of interest in the process of making software interact with the real world. I hope more schools follow in this one’s path.
The PDF of my slides with notes is here:
– berkeley_info290-13_todkurt.pdf (8.8MB PDF)
Thank you so much for your inspirational lecture! We are all really excited and inspired by you in many different levels: design, technology, extended design space, business… We, the Berkeley design community, hope to keep close tie with you, Mike, and ThingM!
aww poop…I wish I had known you were up here doing that, I would have come and crashed the class…erm I mean come and said hi :)