REU Site: Design Tech - Sparking Research in Interactive Visual Design

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The site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU Program.Digital technology has already moved from the machine room to the desktop, and is now embeddingitself fully in our daily lives, becoming a designed artifact. Todays undergraduates love designedtechnology, and with justification: the outsourcing of purely technical work is more common every day,while creative technical design work remains truly value-added and secure. Yet oddly, there are feweducational and research programs that train future professionals for this environment.The three-summer Design Tech program will begin to address this lack, inviting exceptionalundergraduate students in computer science and design to an interactive visual design hothouse. Theprogram is organized around several principles common to design and technology: celebrating creativityfeeding the spark that motivates successful designers and researchers; embracing critique encouraging bold thinking and original work by making critique less threatening; focus on product increasing the understandability of design and technical theory by placing it in an applied context; socialcreativity emphasizing the group dialog of successful creativity to improve teamwork and diversity;interdisciplinary teamwork using cross-disciplinary teams to improve research and design quality; teamdiversity bettering designed technology with broader ethnic and cultural participation.Design Tech students will be recruited from local womens and historically black colleges, passthrough an orientation, be formed into project-centered teams, and work with investigators in semi-weeklymeetings. Less frequent critique sessions inspired by design pedagogy will encourage independent andcritical thought. Projects will target delivery at a final session Showcase open to the public. Researchtopics will emphasize interactive visual design, and be drawn from the existing research agendas of thefour investigators, who are experts in graphics, visualization, artificial intelligence and design.Intellectual MeritBy bringing together the design and interactive computing communities in aresearch and educational environment, Design Tech will generate powerful intellectual ripples. Obviously,the research successfully performed by the undergraduates will have value, as will their learning aboutresearch and design. As researchers and designers work together on these research problems, they willfind new solutions and perhaps more important, generate new problems. Similarly, as they cooperate onpedagogy, they will synthesize new techniques for making better designers out of researchers, and betterresearchers out of designers.Broader ImpactsWith its emphasis on diversity, Design Tech will have a broad impact on thetechnical education of women and minorities. The investigators will publish their pedagogical successesand failures on the web and in print, disseminating the results of their experiment. PI Watson is alreadyorganizing a new SIGGRAPH course on graphics and design as well as an ACM campfire on interactivevisual design; his experiences in Design Tech will shape the thoughts he brings to and the contentdisseminates at those events.