Courses of Interest

This course introduces human-centered design principles and process. Students learn to apply the process and principles to generate innovative design solutions. Topics include empathy, defining design problem, ideation, emotional design, product prototyping and testing. A semester long team based project allows students to apply classroom learnings to real life design problem.

This course is designed to provide an understanding of ergonomics as a science and process, with an emphasis on people at work. Discussion of ergonomic methods for measurement, assessment, and evaluation, with major topics including manual materials handling, cumulative trauma disorders, environmental stresses, and safety issues.

This course surveys qualitative and quantitative research methods in human-centered design and engineering. Different data collection and measurement techniques are covered for different types of data, including subjective, behavioral, and physiological data. Human subject involved experiment design and introduction to basic statistics are also be covered in this course. Other topics include cognitive task analysis, physiological computing in emotional design and sentiment analysis in user needs elicitation process. Students learn to formulate research questions and hypotheses, design and conduct a research study, and present research results through various case studies.

This course introduces current theory and design techniques concerning how user interfaces (UI) and user experience (UX) should be designed and assessed to be easy to learn and use. Course includes flowing general modules introduction of HCI & UX; Interface/Interaction design strategy; Advanced Issues in HCI; and Evaluation methods.

This course requires students to create advanced digital design projects while exploring foundational creative principles in processes of artistic production. Students learn about the development of digital art and the impact of technology on the arts, business, education, engineering, and manufacturing. Students consider ideas and issues that define the role of art and design in the community and in society while working on independent projects that aid in the development of professional portfolios.

This course introduces information visualization techniques and process which produce effective visualization and help people understand and analyze data. Topics include basics of information visualization, including its history and necessity, human aspects to understand how human perceives visual stimuli, considerations to present data, strategic techniques to summarize and display information, and evaluation of information design.

Overview of drive characteristics, capabilities, and limitations. Human variability and driver demographics, driver performance measurements. Driver information processing models, driver errors and response time. Driver sensory capabilities: vision, audition, and other inputs. Vehicle controls and displays. Driver anthropometry, biomechanical considerations.

A consideration of major theories and research results related to learning and memory.