REU Site: Design Tech - Sparking Research in Interactive Visual Design

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

The site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU Program. Digital technology has already moved from the machine room to the desktop, and is now embedding itself fully in our daily lives, becoming a designed artifact. Todays undergraduates love designed technology, and with justification: the outsourcing of purely technical work is more common every day, while creative technical design work remains truly value-added and secure. Yet oddly, there are few educational and research programs that train future professionals for this environment. The three-summer Design Tech program will begin to address this lack, inviting exceptional undergraduate students in computer science and design to an interactive visual design hothouse. The program is organized around several principles common to design and technology: celebrating creativity feeding the spark that motivates successful designers and researchers; embracing critique encouraging bold thinking and original work by making critique less threatening; focus on product increasing the understandability of design and technical theory by placing it in an applied context; social creativity emphasizing the group dialog of successful creativity to improve teamwork and diversity; interdisciplinary teamwork using cross-disciplinary teams to improve research and design quality; team diversity bettering designed technology with broader ethnic and cultural participation. Design Tech students will be recruited from local womens and historically black colleges, pass through an orientation, be formed into project-centered teams, and work with investigators in semi-weekly meetings. Less frequent critique sessions inspired by design pedagogy will encourage independent and critical thought. Projects will target delivery at a final session Showcase open to the public. Research topics will emphasize interactive visual design, and be drawn from the existing research agendas of the four investigators, who are experts in graphics, visualization, artificial intelligence and design. Intellectual Merit By bringing together the design and interactive computing communities in a research and educational environment, Design Tech will generate powerful intellectual ripples. Obviously, the research successfully performed by the undergraduates will have value, as will their learning about research and design. As researchers and designers work together on these research problems, they will find new solutions and perhaps more important, generate new problems. Similarly, as they cooperate on pedagogy, they will synthesize new techniques for making better designers out of researchers, and better researchers out of designers. Broader Impacts With its emphasis on diversity, Design Tech will have a broad impact on the technical education of women and minorities. The investigators will publish their pedagogical successes and failures on the web and in print, disseminating the results of their experiment. PI Watson is already organizing a new SIGGRAPH course on graphics and design as well as an ACM campfire on interactive visual design; his experiences in Design Tech will shape the thoughts he brings to and the content disseminates at those events.