bill verplank interaction design video

Bill Verplank: Sketching User Interfaces

Bill Verplank, designer of the Xerox Star user interface and lecturer at Stanford University, visited the Media Computing Group for a B-IT Research Seminar on Sketching User Interfaces from Sep 28 until Oct 2, 2009. The seminar was held in English.

Seminar Schedule

The seminar Sketching User Interfaces was held in 5 morning sessions from 10–11:30, Monday Sep 28 through Friday Oct 2, in seminar room 2010 in the CS building at RWTH Aachen University, Ahornstr. 55 (directions). Additional classes and one-on-one signup times to meet Bill were held Mon–Fri from 14–15:30. Class times were scheduled so that driving to the event from Bonn and back was possible while avoiding rush hours.

Monday

10:00–11:30 Introduction. Sketching metaphors. Interaction design exercises. Learn some sketching skills and use them in interaction design.

14:00–15:30 Tangible Interfaces for Musical Expression from Interval to CCRMA.

Tuesday

10:00–11:30 Sketching activities. Basic sketching skills in improvising scenarios (places, people, sequences, satisfactions). Form a team, pick a problem.

14:00–15:30 Developing the Star User Interface: A look behind the scenes.

19:00–22:00 Dinner with Bill at a restaurant in Aachen.

Wednesday

10:00–11:30 Sketching activities. Paradigms and their metaphors (intelligence, tool, media, life, vehicle, fashion). Teams: chooose a paradigm or two.

14:00–15:30 One-on-ones: Individual signup time to talk to Bill about your research.

Thursday

10:00–11:30 Sketching activities. Tradeoffs: Do (handle vs. button), Feel (hot vs. cool), Know (map vs. path). Teams: decide on most relevant tradeoffs.

13:00–14:00 Group report on the DESIRE Summer School by Max, Bill and Jan during Club i10.

14:00–15:30 One-on-ones:Individual signup time to talk to Bill about your research

Friday

10:00–11:30 Sketching activities. Framework: Observe (idea/error), Invent (metaphor/scenario), Design (model/task), Present (display/control). Teams: finalize.

14:00–15:30 One-on-ones:Individual signup time to talk to Bill about your research.

Registration and Materials

To sign up for this class if you are not a PhD student of the Media Computing Group, please email Max Möllers. Due to the practical nature of this seminar, attendance is limited.

Bill has kindly agreed to make the course notes for his seminar available for participants to download. The seminar requires you to read through these rather compact notes before the seminar.

For those unable to attend, we arranged for the class to be recorded. You will only gain a fraction of the value from watching the class on video because of its focus on practical sketching exercises, but it is a way to get an idea of what was going on. Recordings are available below.

About the speaker

Bill Verplank is an interaction designer, human-factors engineer and visiting scholar at Stanford University. He studied mechanical engineering and product design at Stanford (1960–1965) and returned there to teach "visual thinking" with Robert McKim (1971–1974). His PhD (1965–1977) is from MIT in man-machine systems with Thomas Sheridan, applying information and control theory to measuring human operator workload in manual control tasks. As a graduate student, he won MIT's top teaching award, the Goodwin Medal, and built kinetic sculpture at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

At Xerox (1978–1986), he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star graphical user interface. For seven years, he taught "Graphical User Interface Design", "Graphic Invention for User Interfaces" and "Scenarios for Observation and Invention" as tutorials at the ACM CHI conference, and participated in developing the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum recommendations.

From 1986–1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user interfaces into the product design world; he started calling it "interaction design" instead of "user interface design".

At Interval Research (1992–2000), he directed research and design for collaboration, tangibility and music. At Stanford, during that time, he worked with Terry Winograd to establish a studio course on Human-Computer Interaction Design which he taught for five years.

Since 2000, he has been a part-time lecturer at CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford, teaching a course on designing input devices. He also served on the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2000–2005).

More details about Bill can be found here.

Video recordings

We recorded the seminar, and the result are two excellent videos about basic sketching skills. In part one, Bill shows basic technique exercises, how to sketch people and faces, and explains the basic concepts of perspective. In part two, he explains how to draw ellipses in perspective.