IGD - Interaction, Graphics & Design Track

This course presents tools for developing 2D interactive applications: Qt GUI toolkit (in C++), Android user interfaces on mobile devices, Web interface basics.
See also: CSC_0EL10_TP (Web development), CSC_0EL11_TP (Paradigms of Programming/C++), CSC_4IG05 (Human-Computer Interaction).

Quant UX, or Quantitative User Experience (research) is an emerging field with strong industry applications, that applies quantitative methodologies (statistics, data-science) to understand how users interact with digital systems, to find bottlenecks and make better decisions. The increasing integration of a digital layer in all facets of everyday life, from professional to personal, makes it essential to consider how diverse groups of end-users are interacting with digital systems. The majority of digital systems from websites to apps, are registering data on user-interactions which can be analyzed systematically to understand how users interact with an interface, where they encounter bottlenecks, and where there are opportunities for improvement. These include surveys, A/B testing, analysis of data logs, as well as psychophysiological methods like eye-tracking and others. Importantly, the aim of these methods is not stop at analysis, but needs to be linked with actionable insights and innovations.

Physical representations of data pre-exist with the invention of the written language. While our contemporary notion of data did not yet exist, early humans externalized their memory by encoding quantitative or qualitative values into physical objects. Over the following millennia, physical data representations allowed people to record, reflect, reason, and decide about the world in new and profound ways. Creating data objects is far from a lost art, and an explosion of new fabrication technologies also introduced an ever-wider array of physical tools to support thinking and communication. We are now in an era where data is an increasingly visible part of our everyday existence, a growing number of artists, designers, makers, and everyday people are actively exploring the possibilities of making data physical. This class will provide the student the occasion to reflect on how data could be encoded and manipulated in physical objects. This class will cover first a short historical introduction, second some snapshots of the practices used by contemporary designers, and some design considerations. The main focus of the class will be to create a physical object to either encode data during a collective action or to represent an existing dataset. This class will be based on the recently published book “Making with Data” (https://makingwithdata.org/).

The goals of this course are: To introduce the fundamental principles of visualization; To give an overview of existing visualization techniques and systems; To understand how to critique visualization techniques for a particular kind of data for a particular task; To learn how to evaluate visualization systems; To provide the foundation necessary to create new visualization tools.

Human-Computer Interaction addresses the design, development and evaluation of interactive systems. This area is critical to how we experience the digital world as the number and diversity of users, devices, on-line services and available information increases. This course introduces students to the foundations of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), emphasizing its multi-disciplinary aspect. The course gives an overview of the field of human-computer interaction, including a review of interaction styles, basic elements of psychology for HCI, the design process of interactive systems, and an in-depth analysis of graphical interaction and the notion of conceptual modeling.

This course extends the Fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction course with selected topics, which are mainly research-oriented but are also of interest for practical applications. The course starts with a brief history of HCI and then presents three in-depth studies of interaction at various levels, including pointing (the most basic and most common interaction in graphical user interfaces), instrumental interaction (an extension to direct manipulation based on human's ability to create and use tools), and collaborative computing (as an introduction to the elective of the same name). The course then provides a wide overview of models, theories and frameworks used in HCI, rooted in psychology, cognitive science, software engineering, and HCI itself.

Generative Theories of Interaction are inspired by existing theories of human cognition and behavior and applied to interaction design. They include concepts specific to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that are transformed into actionable principles for designing interactive systems. These generative theories offer both researchers and User Experience (UX) designers the opportunity to design truly novel forms of interaction that are both simpler to use and provide greater power of expression. This course presents two generative theories of interaction — instrumental interaction and co-adaptation — and illustrates how to apply them to the redesign of an existing system. Students will first analyze the system according to the design principles, then critique it, and then create a new design based on these principles. The best student projects will be added to the Interaction.Museum.

This course uses the Design of Interactive Systems course methodology to design and evaluate interactions with human-centered AI systems. It introduces advanced theories from HCI, cognitive science, communication, and design research to better understand human-AI collaborative behavior, as well as reflections on how to design such behavior in the context of social, legal, and sustainability concerns. Along with these lectures, students will work in groups of three or four to design, and evaluate an intelligent interactive system, which will be represented as video prototypes. The goal is to design human-AI systems in a more human-centered way, utilizing user feedback to address real user needs and understandings. Students will learn a variety of advanced techniques, such as co-adaptive instruments, generative walkthroughs, structured observation, and alternative methods for developing and evaluating novel approaches with no existing comparisons. All in-class and homework exercises are required to complete the final project, so attendance and participation are critical. Grades are based on in-class and homework exercises, as well as the presentation of each project's final video prototype to an external jury for evaluation.

This class is an introduction to the different methods for evaluating interactive systems. By the end of this class, students should be able to identify the right evaluation method to consider depending on the type of users, the type of the system and the design stage of the system.

This course presents computer-supported collaborative systems, which allow groups of people, whether they are collocated or not, to work together while sharing computer artifacts. The course covers groupware and mediated interaction, including a state-of-the-art of interactive systems for coordination, communication and collaboration among groups of users across time and space. The course also covers Collaborative Virtual Environments, a research area at the intersection of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, teleoperation, high-bandwidth communication, human-computer interaction and collaborative teleworking. Finally it covers recent developments such as social networks and crowdsourcing.

Social and motivational interactions are becoming increasingly important in Human-Computer Interactions in response to societal needs for healthy behavior change. Many systems involve for example virtual characters endowed with social interaction capabilities and the possibility to display non verbal expressions such as facial expressions, gaze and gestures (video games, virtual worlds, virtual e-coaches for health applications, animation, digital arts, pedagogical agents, on-line assistants, virtual patients for training doctors). This module presents research in modeling, animating, and rendering realistic and expressive autonomous virtual humans. It introduces the theoretical foundations of motivation and multimodal communication in relation with theories and models from Psychology that are adapted to inform the design of computational models of mobile applications and interactive and expressive virtual humans. This includes theories, models and software architectures for managing motivation, emotions, personality, facial expressions, gestures and bodily interactions. Design frameworks, software architectures and integration of these social and motivational dimensions in HCI design are presented. Applications in relevant fields of multimodal and social interaction are presented as use cases: virtual coaches and motivational / persuasive technologies for sport, physical activities, nutrition, stress management, personal and corporate well being ; pedagogical agents for training social skills. On-going PhD theses are presented.

This course presents methods and techniques for designing efficient, user-friendly user interfaces. The course focuses on both software engineering aspects (software design, advanced programming, toolkits...) and on human factors (user-centered design, evaluation, ergonomics ...). It also includes an introduction to new interactive techniques (gestural interaction, augmented reality, tangible interfaces, wearable computing ...) Topics covered include User-centered design, brainstorming, design and prototyping, user evaluation; Ergonomic principles, perception, action, pointing, Web ergonomics; Software design, development tools; Advanced Interfaces (courses extending 4IG02): Statecharts, graphical models, performance, internationalization, SVG, animations ...; 2D and 3D gestural interaction, multitouch, command selection, text entry; Emerging techniques (augmented reality, tangible interfaces, mobile interaction, wearable computing, groupware, etc.)