New Course Proposal: IAT 452-3 The Design of Design Environments
Dr Nemo
13 January 2005
This is one of 4 upper division core courses for the Technology in Arts and Design stream. Its domain of concern is representation authoring in design, where “design” is taken broadly as a process of making proposals for change. It uses specific advanced design systems as cases, for example, drawing systems, parametric modelling systems and games authoring environments.
People work with computers to produce representations of artifacts. Important side-effects include learning about the representation, problem being addressed and system being used. The task is characterized by high cognitive load, performance measured by quality of artifact produced and change of user internal state as a result of using the tool. An extension of the task is doing all of this in collaboration with others.
The complex task of representation authoring has several facets, each of which requires prior study. These include the structure of human cognition when engaged in complex tasks; models of learning; methods for evaluating task performance; the structure of suitable models and metaphors upon which representations can be based; interaction design for representation authoring and the actual symbol systems that must be implemented to support the task.
The course will cover each of these issues through lectures and workshops based on chosen authoring systems. Assessable work will include students proposing, designing, building and testing elements of such systems. A final examination will test for understanding of the generic material.
Course outline (as topics)
Task analysis of representation authoring. Schon’s model of reflective practice. Cognition, learning, meta-modelling, reuse, and workflow as issues.
Human performance in cognitively complex tasks.
Performance metrics.
Design models for representation authoring. Single person-single representation. Alternatives. Collaboration.
The architecture of systems for representation authoring, including interface, representation, representation conversion.
Designing interfaces
Testing. Measures of system performance. Measures of artifact performance.