Human-Computer Interaction Institute T-Shirt Competition
News
In the last week of August, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University welcomes the newest students into the Ph.D., Master in Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) and Portugal Program, and Master of Educational Technology and Applied Science (METALS) cohorts. Orientation week culminate for all groups with one of the department’s most long-standing traditions: the new student t-shirt contest.
The History of the Shirt
The t-shirt judging contest is one of the first traditions implemented for students at HCII since the department’s founding in 1994. The contest is a creative way to pull together new students from all HCII programs with faculty, current students, and department staff participating in the actual judging and voting for each year’s shirt. Nicole Willis, associate director of MHCI, has coordinated the t-shirt contest for the past decade. “The student T-shirt design contest is one of the first creative challenges that HCII students are faced with during orientation week,” Willis explains. “This introduction to the collaborative work environment while being fun is hugely valuable for learning purposes in our diverse environment. This event is an awesome experience every year for the department as we head into a new academic year.”
The Rules
The HCII t-shirt contest rules are simple. Pick a t-shirt color. Pick two font colors. (Nothing vulgar.) Students work in teams for two hours creating a design to submit to a panel of judges including HCII staff, faculty and current students. “Our annual T-shirt contest is one of the events I look forward to every year,” says Jason Hong, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s HCII. “The students get to show off their range of creativity in a hands-on crash course in teamwork and rapid prototyping. Although we can only choose one design each year, I still keep some of the other designs just because I loved them so much.”
At the completion of the two-hour ideating and design phase, students hang up their designs and give 30-second speed pitches to the judges and their peers. The format of these design presentations mirrors a much larger presentation the master's students will be creating in just a few short months. This time, it won’t be to win t-shirt bragging rights. Instead, it will be to present a human-computer interaction solution for their Capstone project, a seven-month course that serves as the fulcrum to the MHCI and METALS curriculum.
The Capstone Sponsorship
Similar to the approach for the t-shirt contest, the Capstone course for master’s students is based on teams of 4-5 students from interdisciplinary backgrounds. They are tasked with an HCI challenge and are asked to create a unique, creative, well-designed and tested solution that they will present at the end of their seven-month course.
Laura Ballay, past director of the Master of Human-Computer Interaction, explains the unique industry partnership aspect to the program’s Capstone project. “The highly collaborative, 7-month Capstone project allows master’s students to exercise their human-centered research methods and interaction design skills in a practical application. The value of this project is that it is not only hands-on learning, but students are actually creating solutions for real world problems. Together with a team’s industry mentors and faculty advisors, the students explore the end-to-end design process of a product, taking it from concept discovery to product ideation and concluding with a prototype.” Ballay added that, “Students are given the opportunity to explore, invent and validate solutions for complex, ambiguous problems. These are critical skills valued by industry organizations that actively hire HCI graduates into user experience roles. Our students graduate with an intimate idea of how academic methodologies applies to the business world.” Ballay believes it is incorporating this kind of real world experience into a professional program that makes CMU MHCI and METALS graduates some of the most sought after hires in the industry.
While the Capstone project is still months away for these new master’s students, they passed the t-shirt contest with flying colors. The winner for this year’s contest played off one of the core beliefs of the program: that people are at the center of everything we do. Be sure to look out for HCII-ers wearing one of the winning desings on campus!
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor for a future Capstone project, please let us know by emailing lmccann@cs.cmu.edu. We can provide more information regarding this rewarding collaboration.