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HCI and education: a blended design experience

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Abstract

Teaching HCI in an undergraduate course for computer scientists is often a challenging experience, because the skills that characterize HCI are different from scientific and computational thinking that are the focus of most subjects of the curriculum. Often HCI teaching is organized as a set of lectures that are useful to learn concepts, but don’t increase the design skills of the students. This work reports the results of an educational experience where both learners and teachers were actively involved in a process of knowledge construction and design. This process usually happens in other domains, such as architecture or industrial design, but is not part of most computer science curricula. We chose as project a challenging theme: the design of eco-feedback interfaces that inform people about the consequences of their actions for the environment and help to take decisions for lowering energy consumption. Eco-feedback interfaces are also representative of the gap between the products available on the market and the results of scientific studies, evidenced also by a recent workshop about HCI education. The workshop evidenced a number of pitfalls in HCI education that in our educational experience we tried to overcome with appropriate methodologies. An additional challenging task was the attempt to organize all the design activities taking advantage of a platform for remote learning, stressing its limits. The paper will discuss all these issues, evidencing where the applied methodologies gave good results and where they need further improvements, with the final goal of giving useful advices for HCI educational experiences to come.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Prof. Emmanuel Dubois and his group at the Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier for taking part to the final evaluation of the course’s projects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Via Torino 155, 30172, Mestre Venezia, Italia

    Fabio Pittarello & Tommaso Pellegrini

Authors
  1. Fabio Pittarello
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  2. Tommaso Pellegrini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabio Pittarello.

Appendix:

Appendix:

1.1 A.1 List of bibliographic references given to students

  • Barreto, M., Karapanos, E., Nunes, N.: Why don’t families get along with eco-feedback technologies? A longitudinal inquiry. In: Proc. of CHItaly ’13, pp. 16:1-16:4. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2013)

  • Chisik, Y.: An image of electricity: Towards an understanding of how people perceive electricity. In: Proc. of INTERACT’11, pp. 100-117. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011).

  • Froehlich, J., Findlater, L., Landay, J.: The design of eco-feedback technology. In: Proc. of CHI ’10, pp. 1999-2008. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2010)

  • Gustafsson, A., Gyllenswärd, M.: The power-aware cord: Energy awareness through ambient information display. In: CHI ’05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’05, pp. 1423-1426. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2005)

  • Heller, F., Borchers, J.: Physical prototyping of an on-outlet power-consumption display. Interactions 19(1), 14-17 (2012)

  • Holmes, T.G.: Eco-visualization: Combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption. In: Proc. of C&C ’07, pp. 153-162. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2007)

  • Moere, A.V., Tomitsch, M., Hoinkis, M., Trefz, E., Johansen, S., Jones, A.: Comparative feedback in the street: Exposing residential energy consumption on house facades. In: Proc. of INTERACT’11, pp. 470-488. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011).

  • Nisi, V., Nunes, N.J., Quintal, F., Barreto, M.: Sinais from fanal: Design and evaluation of an art-inspired eco-feedback system. In: Proc. of CHItaly ’13, pp. 3:1-3:10. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2013)

  • Quintal, F., Pereira, L., Nunes, N.J., Nisi, V.: What-a-watt : Where does my electricity comes from? In: Adjunct Proc. of AVI ’14. Como, Italy (2014)

1.2 A.2 List of eco-feedback products and online services given to students

1.3 A.3 List of additional bibliographic references provided by students

  • Costanza, E., Ramchurn, S.D., Jennings, N.R.: Understanding domestic energy consumption through interactive visualisation: A field study. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp ’12, pp. 216-225. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012).

  • Fischer, C.: Feedback on household electricity consumption: a tool for saving energy? Energy Efficiency 1(1), 79-104 (2008).

  • Foster, D., Lawson, S., Wardman, J., Blythe, M., Linehan, C.: “Watts in it for me?”: Design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organisations. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12, pp. 2357-2366. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012).

  • Jain, R.K., Taylor, J.E., Peschiera, G.: Assessing eco-feedback interface usage and design to drive energy efficiency in buildings. Energy and Buildings 48, 8-17 (2012).

  • Mankoff, J., Fussell, S.R., Glaves, R., Grevet, C., Johnson, M., Matthews, D., Matthews, H.S., McGuire, R., Thompson, R., Shick, A., Setlock, L.: StepGreen.org: Increasing energy saving behaviors via social networks. In: Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2010).

  • Petkov, P., Goswami, S., Köbler, F., Krcmar, H.: Personalised eco-feedback as a design technique for motivating energy saving behaviour at home. In: Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design, NordiCHI ’12, pp. 587-596. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012).

  • Quintal, F., Pereira, L., Nunes, N.J.: A long-term study of energy eco-feedback using non-intrusive load monitoring. In: Adjunct Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, pp. 49-52 (2012)

  • Spagnolli, A., Corradi, N., Gamberini, L., Hoggan, E., Jacucci, G., Katzeff, C., Broms, L., Jonsson, L.: Eco-feedback on the go: Motivating energy awareness. Computer 44(5), 38-45 (2011)

  • Van Dam, S.: Smart and usable home energy management systems. In: Proceedings of 6th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, EcoDesign Conference (2009)

  • Xie, L., Antle, A.N., Motamedi, N.: Are tangibles more fun?: Comparing children’s enjoyment and engagement using physical, graphical and tangible user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, TEI ’08, pp. 191-198. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008).

1.4 A.4 List of additional commercial products, projects and online services added by students

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Pittarello, F., Pellegrini, T. HCI and education: a blended design experience. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 4895–4923 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3782-7

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