Human Interface

Interaction Design Fundamentals with Chris Fahey

Students were challenged to create a functional specification for a human being, describing its internal and external behavior, including how it listens, thinks, and speaks in context of a "user's" experience. The assignment encouraged students to devise creative ways of thinking about, communicating, and describing behavior.

• Katie Koch : Starbucks Barista

  

  I considered the Starbucks barista as a human interface. Much like the IBM punch card machines that begun an era of computing, the baristas take a command from a customer, translate it to a language the system can understand, and produce another form of output at the end: a beverage. To articulate this process, I created a distillation diagram to show that plain English is translated to Starbucks short-form, which acts as a set of instructions for the production of physical output.

• Derek Chan : The Orchestral Experience Ecosystem

  

  This assignment required us to think about think about human beings as “products” who are being used by a set of users. I chose the classical conductor as my subject and studied the relationship a conductor has with the various members of the orchestra. Most notably, the different forms of communication between the conductor and the musicians tie together the orchestral experience ecosystem.