Transforming Grounds

As the Director of the HCI /d MS program at School of Informatics, Indiana Univeristy , I am extremely happy and proud. Our fantastic students, who have won the competition the last two years, once again dominates the competition. Out of the 12 final teams (chosen from 52 international submissions) invited to present at CHI, an impressive number of 5 teams are from our program! A big congratulations to our students!! After four years of outstanding results in the CHI Student Design Competition it is obvious that we are doing something right with our HCI /d program. Apparently we create highly creative and innovative interaction designers, and it is a pleasure to be involved with these students in our daily work.

Bill Moggridge has recently published the book " Designing Interactions ". It is a different book, fascinating and stimulating. It is a book that from a design perspective presents a bit of the history of the field of interaction design, designers that have had an impact on the field and its most famous products. Moggridge has personally been in the center of this development for the last decades and has a lot of insights, personal experience, and knowledge. It is not an academic text, at least that is what Moggridge claims, but I find it intellectually stimulating and more to the point than most academic treatments of the field. It takes a strong design position, and that makes a difference! A good one! I highly recommend this book to any student in the field, to any instructor, and to any practitioner, with interest in where we come from, who shaped it, why they did it, etc. The book is based on interviews and is supplemented with a DVD with all interviews in video. The on...