Conceptual Design and Prototyping to Explore Creativity

Many approaches to teaching HCI focus on either user requirements or prototyping. However, these two techniques do not provide enough tools for Students to explore the design space in breadth at early stages of conception. Indeed, even when these two approaches are combined, students still lack tools to explore the design space and bridge the gap from requirements to prototyping. In this paper, we describe the way we teach Human Computer Interaction, stimulating students to be creative during interface design. To that end we added course materials on conceptual design and scenario based interaction, combined with the exploration of different low fidelity prototypes, which we believe increase both the usability of student-developed prototypes and foster learner creativity. To illustrate this we present some of the best examples of interactive prototypes designed and developed by Students attending our HCI Course in the context of Information Systems and Computer Engineering (ISCE) curriculum at the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. While the current approach seems to elicit positive responses and draw encouraging remarks from Students, work remains to be done in emerging interface paradigms and more formal evaluation on how this approach positively affects student outcomes.