Week Nº 22

Session Recording

Project 4 Grading

We’re working through your Links feedback/evaluations from last week, and hope to share them ahead (🤞) of class next week. We’ll be in your Slack DM⁠s, as is custom!

Let’s Talk About “AI” (…again)

We wanted to pick up our conversation around “AI”/ LLM use, with your projects in the rearview mirror:

How did using/incorporating these tools feel, from your perspective?
This is new to us too, as policy; how does it compare with your other classes/experiences/ethics/goals?
On our side, we’re feeling like a lot of the use was… unexamined/uncritical, just taking the responses as “right.”
Within this, our instincts suggest reverse-centaur “cleaning up after the machine”⁠—lots of no-fun, no-learning commenting on the output (or even, completely pointlessly, having the LLM do the commenting).
We’re thinking about changing our policy for your last project, disallowing LLM use. What are folks’ thoughts about that?

Reading Discussion

We’ll properly begin our fifth and final unit, If All You Have Is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, with a discussion of last week’s reading:

What Is Code?
Paul Ford, 2015
Unit Nº 5: Reading Responses

HIGs

We also want to introduce you to human interface guidelines. These documents describe the paradigms, intent, and overall look-and-feel for a given operating system⁠—made to encourage software developers to craft consistent, native-feeling applications for a platform. These are the original digital design systems.

The most famous instance (which lends the category its name) comes from Apple, written for the original Macintosh⁠—the first popular, consumer computer with a graphical user interface. We’ve also selected influential examples through time, covering the era of modern, GUI-based software up to the present day.

We aren’t designing applications for Windows 95 here, but these should serve us in two ways: as a timeline of user-interface design patterns, and as examples of documentation and design systems⁠—particularly the current, ongoing/living versions:

Historical

Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 1987
Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 1992
The Windows Interface Guidelines
Microsoft, 1995
Aqua Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 2001
iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 2008
Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide
Microsoft, 2010
Material Design 1
Google, 2014
iOS Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 2014

Current

Material Design 3
Google, 2021 (ongoing)
Human Interface Guidelines
Apple, 2022 (ongoing)
Fluent 2 Design System
Microsoft, 2023 (ongoing)

Our Final Project

And we’ll introduce you to our final project:

Project Nº 5: Functions

It’s All in Your `<head>`

Finally, let’s look at some odds and ends around sharing:

Puttin’ a (Link/Meta) Bow on It

For Next Week

You’ll complete the first, brainstorming phase for your final project:

Project Nº 5: Define Your Problem

Consider the project introduction thoroughly, identify three (3, three) possible problems to look at, and outline how you might move forward with them.
Submit a link to your document when it is in a good place:

Submission Form

Further out…

We also want you to pick up thinking about/working on your Index projects, due at the end of the semester. Our next milestone:

Project Index: Adding Context and Form

We will be checking in on these on March 25 (after Spring Break), but don’t want this to pile up on our ongoing Project 5 work. Let’s make some progress ahead of then!