DSGN 118:  Design for Creativity and Productivity 

DSGN 118 - Winter 2024

Every day, there are 1 million hours of videos uploaded to YouTube and 95 million photos uploaded to Instagram. The quantity and quality of digital content have a tremendous impact on our lives. Despite the mind-blowing speed of generating new content, authoring high-quality content remains a time-consuming and laborious process for content creators.  

In this course, we will examine the design of existing creativity and productivity support tools, as well as the state-of-art research, for various domains, including image, vector graphics, information visualization, animation, multi-media article, video, live steam, augmented/virtual/mixed reality. We will also discuss how emerging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, digital stylus, speech input, and artificial intelligence can be used to further enhance the creativity and productivity of content creators. This course also includes a quarter-long team project, with which you will propose a problem that you believe hinders the creativity and productivity in a content domain that you are interested in (e.g. image, video, etc), with the suitable interaction modality (e.g. multi-touch, speech, etc). No coding is required. 

By the end of this course, you’ll have new conceptual tools for examining the design of creativity and productivity support tools, as well as the knowledge and practice of prototyping new technologies that can address the identified problems.

Lectures and Office Hours

Lecture: 3:30-4:50 pm, Tuesday and Thursday, DIB 122.

Professor Office Hour: 3-4pm, Friday. Design and Innovation Building (DIB),  Room 363

TA Office Hour: 3-3:50 pm, Wednesday.  Design and Innovation Building (DIB),  Room 361

Instruction Team

Haijun Xia is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Design Lab at UC San Diego. His research area is Human-Computer Interaction, in which he focuses on augmenting our productivity and creativity by innovating on fundamental user interface paradigms and interaction techniques. 

Yining "Rima" Cao (TA) is a third-year PhD student in the Creativity Lab. She works on intelligent tools for visual content creation. She is especially interested in leveraging dynamic information structures to facilitate visual thinking and storytelling. Besides, she loves dancing, motion graphics, and sushi. 

Course Logistics and Grading

This course involves the following elements and deliverables with associated weighted grading percentages: 

Course grades will be assigned according to the following scale: ≥ 97%: A+; ≥ 93%: A; ≥ 90%: A-; ≥ 87%: B+ etc. We will uphold UCSD’s commitment to academic integrity.

A1 - AI for Creativity and Productivity (20%) AI is changing our world in unimaginable ways in areas of scientific discoveries, language understanding, as well as creativity and productivity support. In this assignment, you need to use powerful AI tools to create high-quality multimedia content and reflect on your experience.

A2 - Research Presentation (30%)   The goal of the assignment is to gain the experience of reading, presenting, and discussing cutting-edge research papers. A list of pre-selected papers will be recommended at the beginning of the class.  You are encouraged to select papers that are not on the list but relevant to the course topic. You will receive clear instructions and a rubric for how the presentation will be graded when it is assigned. 

A3 - Design Project (35%)  The team project is the designing and prototyping of an interactive system that addresses the problems you have identified.  You can reuse the problems identified in A1.  The team project will be graded by the deliverables of each stage of the project. Major stages include storyboards, early prototypes, final prototypes, mid-term presentations, and final presentations. You will receive clear instructions and a rubric for each stage when it is assigned. Promising projects will be offered the opportunity of further research and development under the instructor’s supervision for academic research paper submission. 

Presentation Engagement (15%)  Participation in the A2 presentation is key to an enjoyable experience. It includes participating in the peer grading of the presentations and asking questions during the A2 presentations. 

Covered Topics

Lectures will be structured based on the different types of content and different input modalities. Each lecture will cover one or two topics together with a research presentation from the students. The full list of papers of the different topics can be found under the readings page.

Different Types of Content

Interaction Modality and Techniques

Content on this website is subject to change.