sigchi.be invites Bill Verplank 9 July 2008

SIGCHI.be, the Belgian professional association for Human-Computer Interaction, is proud to invite you to a presentation by Bill Verplank on ‘Sketching metaphors’.

During the first half of July, Bill Verplank is teaching at the Technical University of Eindhoven. He was found willing to address SIGCHI.be for an evening. We could only firm up this event a few days ago, which is why you are getting the invitation rather late. Sorry about that.

DATE: Wednesday 9 July
TIME: 19:00 – 21:30
VENUE: Namahn library, Brussels (http://www.namahn.com/reach )

To sign up for this event, please forward the below form to david.Geerts@soc.kuleuven.be . Please do so at the latest on Tuesday evening.

Name: [  ]
Organisation: [  ]
Job title: [  ]
SIGCHI.be member ID: [  ]
Attendance fee: [   euro]

Please transmit the attendance fee to account 210-0718355-25 (SIGCHI.be), clearly mentioning the name of the event ‘Verplank’ and the name of the participant(s).

Bill Verplank

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 work-load 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 SIGCHI 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. Also, he lectures in Computer Science for the HCI Studio course.

The presentation

In his presentation, Bill will explore some important themes about today’s world of experience design. He’ll look at the systems we create: Are they tools? An extension of our brain? Or, maybe they are a vehicle to achieving a greater goal? Or a type of fashion?

Using a series of live sketches (something you have to see to believe), Bill will explore each of these paradigms, look at how each paradigm helps us see the products of our work a little differently and, perhaps, with new insights we hadn’t seen before.

Bill has always been interested in how we use metaphors in our work: in understanding vocabulary (“kill the program”), in inventing (“cash cows”), for organizing (“desktop folders”), for presenting (“radio buttons”). He’s interested in how we can use metaphor as a creative machine — just attach a crank and churn out a new design.

You’ll hear Bill’s personal view of the history and future of human-computer interaction. Along the way, you might pick up some tricks for sketching, which he calls “thinking with a pencil”.
We’ll see you there!