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>> [Background music] Human Centered Design & Engineering prepares students to assume
positions of intellectual leadership in industry, government, non-profit organizations, and
academia. HCDE students learn the newest communication technologies and practices, the most effective
information design strategies, and the research skills appropriate to their interests.
>> Darivanh: My name is Darivanh Vlachos, and I'm in the Human Centered Design & Engineering
department. Engineering is about building what people live with, and I like to be part
of that design. HCDE helped me kind of blend using technology and actually catering to
the person. We try to take everything that is possible, and we try to make that so that
it's human centered, just like our name. Just in our research group alone, we have an anthropology
major, we have an English major, and we have programmers, so really, anyone can be part
of HCDE. Our research project is about how people learn about technology, and we're doing
that by building a 3-D printer. The bigger scope of our research is to learn how other
people learn about technology so that we can actually bring that component of learning
into developing countries and hopefully help them with farming, building, whatever other
technologies that they might want to use.
>> John: Hi, I'm John Porter, and a senior in Human Centered Design & Engineering. I
chose HCDE because I really always grew interested in issues of usability interaction design,
but then also predominantly in assistive technology because with my disability not only am I interested
in the way that everybody interacts with technology but also how that paradigm is different for
people that have various impairments. My project involves building a low-cost, rugged, portable
ultrasound unit for midwives in Uganda. In our country and ones like ours, it's very
easy to diagnose a simple, easy-to-spot medical condition. So our project was to try to develop
some technology that would be not only appropriate for the resource constraints financially over
there, but also culturally relevant, and try to bring down those horribly high death rates.
We have people with a lot of different backgrounds, ranging from user experience to HCI to CS,
even to biochemistry and medicine to kind of all collaborate on a very small, close-knit
project. Up until now, almost all advancements made in the field of medical ultrasound have
been made by companies where you have millions and millions of dollars going to R&D. And
because of that, there has been a long tradition of prohibitively high prices. We are taking
a more gorilla-style approach to the development, which is going to allow us to make an incredibly
low-cost device that a lot of third-world countries are going to be able to access the
technology. We're really taking a lot of thought in designing a device that doesn't just do
the job but does the job in the most culturally appropriate way for them. So I think the people
that should think about going into HCDE are those that share our department's interest
in the user and optimizing technology and design by understanding the needs and desires
of the user.
>> Chris: So this is a vision-based multi-touch system. And I'm in the department of human
and computer interaction. So what we're interesting in here is making interaction with the computer
more intuitive. So applications for manipulating objects just through touch is a lot more intuitive
than using a mouse or a keyboard. Specifically, what this research group does is documents
the learning process, so documenting the steps that I took to build the screen and really
exploring how people acquire technical skills. And take that information and apply it to
education here in the U.S. and also abroad in developing countries. Here we have just
a basic kind of a demonstration of the different kinds of things you can do with multi-touch,
so if you're looking at pictures and stuff with friends, or you could imagine that if
these were documents on a conference table, that you could be sharing information. If
you're interested in design, if you're interested in technical writing, if you're interesting
in human and computer interaction, then this is your field.