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NETWORKING: Nass hooks students
up with venture capitalists.
Linda Cicero |
Sneaker-clad Clifford Nass
practically bounces from one end of the lecture hall
stage to the other. The computer scientist-turned-sociologist
is an animated one-man show who mixes PowerPoint slides
with provocative asides to keep students engaged and
guessing.
“Hideously complicated computers need user-friendly
interfaces,” he says in a discussion of the GUI
(graphical user interface) revolution. But “how
the heck can you translate an interface” into
various languages without stepping on cultural taboos?
It’s a challenge he throws out on the first day
of winter quarter to the 92 undergraduates enrolled
in Communications 169, Computers and Interfaces: Psychological
and Social Issues. They’ve all come to the class
with one goal in mind—to design a cool technological
product to solve one problem in one developing country.
There are no prerequisites for Nass’s course.
Students of all backgrounds study the psychology of
how real people interact with everything from neat little
gadgets to the World Wide Web. “It’s about
technology, so we get computer types,” Nass says.
“But its approach is more social sciency, so we
get those types. And because it doesn’t require
significant knowledge of technology, we get a lot of
humanist types who want to know what an interface is.”
As Anna Otieno puts it, “You don’t have
to go to the product design lab and make an actual thing.
You can do everything with descriptions and pictures.”
Otieno, ’03, now a master’s student in media
studies, was randomly assigned to a Comm 169 design
group with three other students last year—computer
science major Wei Hsu, ’03, science, technology
and society major Ross Stewart, ’03, and communications
and political science major Malia Skaer, ’05.
As Skaer was listening to a guest lecturer in a bioethics
course one evening, she unexpectedly found a project
for her Comm 169 group. A doctor who worked for Interplast,
a nonprofit organization that provides free reconstructive
plastic surgery for children and adults in developing
countries, was saying that American surgeons and Vietnamese
nurses working in Ho Chi Minh City faced one insurmountable
barrier: communication. “If there was any way
to solve that, he said, they’d be able to perform
many more surgeries,” Skaer recalls.
Within several weeks, the design group had sketched
out a plan for ICE, or International Communication Essential.
A handheld computing device with a touch screen and
voice recognition technology, ICE stores images and
texts of medical terms on a memory card in both English
and Vietnamese. An American doctor in the middle of
a procedure could say, “translate scalpel,”
and a picture of the instrument would appear on the
PDA screen with captions in both languages; the device
would also pronounce the word “scalpel”
and the Vietnamese equivalent. The portable device would
synch up to a computer station, or ICEberg, that records
patients’ medical information prior to surgery
and also stores instructions for postsurgical care.
After presenting ICE to their classmates, the four
students took the project to the Big Idea Festival that
Nass hosted on campus last spring for 150 of his closest
venture capital friends. In March, the ICE group is
scheduled to meet with the founder of a European start-up
who might be interested in producing and marketing the
device. Although no student designs have yet made it
to market, ideas from a number of projects—including
a karaoke approach to literacy and a method to produce
cheap eyeglasses—appear in products now sold around
the world.
This is the fourth year Nass has taught Comm 169, and
he says in any given year students may design 34 projects
for 27 different countries. He also acknowledges that
the course has changed the way he looks at his own research.
“I’m a consumer guy—I study the most
complex interfaces in the developed world, and I sell
talking Barney dolls and BMWs and Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard
[products],” he says. “But now I look at
things differently. I think, ‘Son of a gun, you
could do that!’ ”
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