H79.2486 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Kelly
This class will explore prototyping social applications, using techniques like participatory design, user feedback, and ultra-rapid deployment. Giving your idea over to users from the very beginning can improve both the quality of your application and the speed at which it develops. The course will familiarize students with rapid prototyping techniques rather than following a more traditional semester-long design process, and is best suited for students who want more experience examining live usage of their concepts. Students will form teams to design and launch a prototype built for a small (<5) core group of people they personally care about, who will collectively approve and participate in each project at every stage. The core group can include both classmates and outside participants who already know each other and the creator(s) well enough to be invested and help determine the direction of the application. At the rapid design stage we will encourage the restatement of flaws as features, promote self interest and obscure topics, make solutions in search of problems, force concepts into seemingly unsuitable technologies, and put something out to be used as quickly as possible by the core group. Teams have 7 weeks to deploy an initial prototype. By the midterm team projects should already be in use by the core group and will enter the deployment stage. Teams will collect feedback from the core group and iterate while the project is live. As the project scope expands, teams spend the second half of the class studying the social effects of changing audiences, applying techniques to study usage rates and 'stickyness', acquiring user feedback automatically, and directing users to newly added features. Teams will open the prototypes up to new users, identify and circumvent flaws, add user customization and recruitment tools, and they may even combine or adapt features from other teams. The prototypes will require some server components and may be built in a wide variety of technologies, including html, pro55essing, and flash. Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience is required.
