UC Berkeley ischool year’s end presentations

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the final project showcase of the Masters’ students at School of Information at UC Berkeley. The 15 projects, most of which entailed a software program of some form or another, spanned a wide variety of areas, reaching from more customer-friendly business registration services for the Californian government to several project to improve communication and evaluation within the university to a web-based collection browser for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UCB to an online marketplace for the food industry.

Of particular interest to us were the two projects in the ICTD area, the Field/Mice Project by Andrea Moed and Owen Otto, which presented an English-language learning video game in which students using multiple mice on one PC learned to collaborate and take turns. With the help of Microsoft and the TIER program at UCB, Andrea and Owen went to Bangalore and tested the game in a number of government schools with 100 children aged 10 to 13.

The second project, called REACH, by Rowena Luk, and also supported by TIER, used a user-centered design approach to develop a software that allowed for social networking among Ghanaian doctors at home and abroad. The system emerged from the insights of several weeks of fieldwork in Ghana, that revealed the tight social network among doctors in Ghana, who use an informal social network to fill gaps in the existing medical infrastructure. Such a human-centered approach is also at the heart of our work, and our methodology of Human-Driven Design and Research (HDDR), which we teach through workshops and white papers.

While we enjoyed all of the presentations, and getting some hands-on playtime afterwards, we were left wanting for projects that really push the envelope in HCI and CRD. If graduate school is not the time to explore the edges of established practices, then when?