Special topics: Designing mobile services

Attention all inventors! This course teaches the emerging art and science of inventing effective mobile services. In this class, students will work in small, interdisciplinary teams to conceive of a mobile service. Students will learn a human-centered service design process (interviewing, competitive analysis, service blueprinting, personas, bodystorming/brainstorming, and story-boarding) to discover unmet needs within a targeted set of users. They will then work to iteratively refine their concept of a mobile service by proving the technical feasibility, the financial viability, and the user desirability. Teams will produce a plan for a mobile service as well as a video that illustrates their service concept and the user experience it is intended to produce. Grades will be determined primarily by the quality of a team’s products.

About the Instructors:
Jim Morris is professor of Computer Science and HCI. He was a co-discoverer of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string searching algorithm. For ten years he worked the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he was part of the team that developed the Alto System, a precursor to today’s personal computers. He directed the project that developed Andrew. He served as department head, then dean in the School of Computer Science. He held the Herbert A. Simon Professorship of Human Computer Interaction. He was the dean of the Silicon Valley campus from 2004 to 2009. He is a founder of the MAYA Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in interactive product design. He also founded Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, Robot Hall of Fame, and Silicon Valley Campus.

John Zimmerman is interaction designer and researcher with a joint appointment at the HCI Institute and at the School of Design. His research focuses include: (i) social computing and the design of public services; (ii) the application of product attachment theory in the design of intelligent products and services; and (iii) mixed-initiative computing that combines human and machine intelligence. John is one of the principle researchers on the Tiramisu project: a mobile service that allows transit riders to crowd-source real-time arrival information by sharing GPS traces with their mobile phones.