My research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on design, prototyping and implementation tools for the era of post-personal computing. As computation moves away from single-user desktop applications, I investigate how new algorithms, applications, and design principles can support the creation of novel user interfaces.

In this talk, I’ll present one slice through my group’s work: research that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and later robustly implement post-desktop interfaces. Making headway in this area involves working in both hardware and software. For example, my group is developing authoring tools that leverage digital fabrication processes to construct functioning prototypes of physically embodied user interfaces in a matter of hours. As a first step, we have recently developed Midas, a design tool to rapidly fabricate capacitive touch sensors based on high-level graphical specifications. Our work on input architectures supports developers that have to write robust gesture recognition code for devices that use such sensors. Our Proton system introduces a declarative gesture specification language that enables static analysis for gesture conflicts and automatic generation of gesture recognizers.

Bjoern Hartmann is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley. He co-directs the Berkeley Institute of Design and the Berkeley Swarm Lab. His research has received numerous Best Paper Awards at ACM CHI and UIST, and an NSF CAREER award in 2012. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2009.