Hasta La Ideas

Final design by Mason Pfau

UI Touchscreen design for a netbook aimed at tweens

I’m a professor at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), where I’ve taught Interaction Design (IxD) in the Industrial Design department for two quarters now. One of the things that attracted me to SCAD was the high number of corporate sponsored classes there—companies often approach SCAD with a project they feel would benefit from a student perspective. Usually, we then take the project and restructure an existing class that maps to the sponsor’s goals and objectives. I truly believe that projects grounded in reality are more compelling educationally, as they provide truer constraints for the students.

Last quarter I had the privilege of teaching a class sponsored by Freescale Semiconductor. Freescale produces computer chips in various categories—the market segment that approached us was the mobile market, whose chips are used in many of the cellphones and other mobile products in high circulation today, including Blackberry and Asus. Specifically, Freescale makes an architecture of CPUs known as ARM. Significantly different from the Intel x86 architecture CPUs that run almost all desktop, laptop and netbook class personal computing systems, ARM attempts to compete against Intel’s ATOM CPU chipset. Atom is currently being used in two classes of devices: the netbook (like the HP Mini and Asus Eeee Pc) and Mobile Internet Devices (MID). ARM differs from the Intel Atom in that it runs cooler (saving space because they don’t need a fan), uses less power (offering extended battery life or a smaller battery), and can’t run Microsoft Windows. All three of these qualities offer both industrial design and interaction design opportunities.

Freescale conducted extensive research with existing non-Windows netbooks and learned that both the user interface and form factor issues co-mingle in these devices. They approached our industrial design department and asked us to work on concepts that address these issues for specific markets: tweens, teens and soccer moms.

There were two sponsored courses that participated in this project. My class was a graduate introduction to interactive product design while the other course was a 4th year undergraduate studio on professional practice and process taught by Professor Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness. What follows is our class’ process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook. Though this case study will focus on the work of my class, there was much collaboration between the two courses’ students, influencing the final outcomes of both.

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