590SBD

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[edit] Scenario-Based Design

Last Taught

Fall 2004

Instructor

Professor Mike Twidale

Has Taken

Cameron Jones

Ingbert Floyd

Dan Wright

Xin Xiang

Damon Cook

Piotr Adamczyk

Ramona Su

Matt Marquissee

Sun-il Kim

Jacob Biehl

Add your name if you've taken this class

[edit] Course Description

Scenario Based Design is an interesting method of designing computer programs or IT systems or gadgets.

In his class, Mike covers all different types of scenarios from communication to design testing to personnas. He also reviews very different uses of scenarios, from written scenarios to the use of professional actors to either explore or communicate design ideas. He also briefly introduces Participatory Design, Affordance Analysis, and Cognitive Walkthroughs.

See the course webpage for more information:

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~twidale/lis590sbd/coursedesc.html

[edit] Comments

I very much enjoyed this course, and learned a great deal from it, though half of what I learned was only tangentially related to Scenario Based Design. The first two thirds of the course tended to have readings that were largely tedious, punctuated every so often by readings that were absolutely fascinating. I found one of the textbooks, Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum to be absolutely fascinating, and the other textbook, John Carroll's Making Use to be tedious, extremely difficult to read and comprehend, and largely not worth the effort of plodding through.

The last third of the class was excellent, however. At this point, we had more or less reviewed the literature surrounding Scenario Based Design, and so Mike allowed us to customize our assignments, either by having us write scenarios for our final paper, or by having us read about a topic relevant to our final paper, and present that topic in class. The presentations were fascinating, the scenarios interesting and extremely varied, and by and large the consensus in the class was that the last few weeks were by far the most productive weeks in the class. A recurring comment was that we should have been writing more scenarios throught the semester, and been expected to do fewer readings.

At the end of the semester, Mike actively sought our impressions of the class, and we were largely honest with him. He acknowledged the need to change the order of the readings, so that the readings which had better introductions to the important concepts of the class would be read in the first few weeks, thereby forming a foundation of knowledge on which we could build. He also acknowledged the need for more hands-on exercises. Since it was his first time teaching this course, I expect the next session to be much more organized and much more effective.

My interpretation of Mike's teaching style is that he gives you plenty of readings to do, often more than you can do (or he expects you to do thoroughly), and then you can skim through the articles, and pick out the interesting ones to focus on. He seems to encourage bringing in other relevant readings to class. He wants a class such as this one to be a vehicle for your research--he wants to teach you a (or several) methods you can use in your research, and is more than happy to allow you to structure the class assignments around your research interests, as long as you can demonstrate to him why your ideas are relevant to the class and interesting/novel.

Mike offers you a great deal of freedom in your work with the understanding that you will take the initiative, however. His classes are optimized to encourage creativity, generation of new ideas, and the exploration of the boundaries of a field. This means, however, that a student who needs guidance, or who is not self-motivated to pursue a particular area of research, or who is not passionate about exploring ideas, will not do very well in the class, and will find it chaotic and unorganized. I loved Mike's teaching style and thrived in his class because it allowed me to fit the class to my interests, and exposed me to fascinating concepts and methodologies, such as Participatory Design and Affordance Analysis, methodologies and concepts I am now using as a foundation in my research.

-Ingbert

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