Abstract
This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper is based upon 5 years of experience and 2 years of analysis of our course, and it presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. EEC-0935103. We are grateful to Justin Chong and Chris Grill for permission to use the pictures in Fig. 1. We greatly appreciate Ron Kemnitzer’s contributions to the team, particularly in the first three offerings of the course. We would also like to thank the reviewers from both the original ISWC version of this paper and the extended journal version for their valuable comments and for being open-minded about a paper that does not neatly fit into the usual categories of submissions.
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Based on “An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Design Course for Wearable and Pervasive Computing Products,” by Tom Martin, Kahyun Kim, Jason Forsyth, Lisa McNair, Eloise Coupey, and Ed Dorsa, which appeared in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, San Francisco, California, June 2011. © 2011 IEEE.
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Martin, T., Kim, K., Forsyth, J. et al. Discipline-based instruction to promote interdisciplinary design of wearable and pervasive computing products. Pers Ubiquit Comput 17, 465–478 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0492-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0492-z