The Power of Examples
Scott Klemmer
13 October 2011
3.30pm-Reception outside Auditorium
4.00pm-Lecture, Rashid Auditorium - Gates & Hillman 4401
ABSTRACT
Designers in many fields rely on examples for inspiration, and examples play an important role in art and design curricula. In this talk, I'll describe several ways that examples help the creative process by illustrating concepts and alternatives. Online media offer a corpus of examples at a scale and diversity never before seen. This wealth of examples opens up new possibilities, but also poses several challenges. How can we leverage these resources? My group's research tools harvest and synthesize examples to empower more people to design interactive systems, learners to acquire new skills, experts to be more creative, and programmers to engage in more design thinking. This research shapes my project-based design teaching, which emphasizes creating diverse alternatives, self-assessment, and using examples to provide design insights and teach abstract principles.
Bio
Scott Klemmer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group.
Organizations around the world use his lab's open-source design tools
and curricula; several books and popular press articles have covered his
research and teaching. He has been awarded the Katayanagi Emerging
Leadership Prize, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, Microsoft Research
New Faculty Fellowship, and several best paper awards at the premier
human-computer interaction conferences (CHI and UIST). His former PhD
students are leaders at top universities, research organizations, and in
Silicon Valley. He has a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and Computer Science
from Brown University, Graphic Design work at RISD, and an MS and PhD in
Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He is the program co-chair of UIST 2011.