>> [Intro with background music]: Human Centered Design & Engineering prepares students to assume positions of intellectual leadership in industry, government, non-profit organizations, and academia. HCDE students learn the newest communication technologies and practices, the most effective information design strategies, and the research skills appropriate to their interests.

>> Darivanh: My name is Darivanh Vlachos, and I'm in the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department. Engineering is about building what people live with, and I like to be part of that design. HCDE helped me kind of blend using technology and actually catering to the person. We try to take everything that is possible, and we try to make that so that it's human centered, just like our name. Just in our research group alone, we have an anthropology major, we have an English major, and we have programmers, so really, anyone can be part of HCDE. Our research project is about how people learn about technology, and we're doing that by building a 3-D printer. The bigger scope of our research is to learn how other people learn about technology so that we can actually bring that component of learning into developing countries and hopefully help them with farming, building, whatever other technologies that they might want to use.

>> John: Hi, I'm John Porter, and a senior in Human Centered Design & Engineering. I chose HCDE because I really always grew interested in issues of usability interaction design, but then also predominantly in assisted technology because with my disability not only am I interested in the way that everybody interacts with technology but also how that paradigm is different for people that have various impairments. My project involves building a low-cost, rugged, portable ultrasound unit for midwives in Uganda. In our country and ones like ours, it's very easy to diagnose a simple, easy-to-spot medical condition. So our project was to try to develop some technology that would be not only appropriate for the resource constraints financially over there, but also culturally relevant, and try to bring down those horribly high death rates. We have people with a lot of different backgrounds, ranging from user experience to HCI to CS, even to biochemistry and medicine to kind of all collaborate on a very small, close-knit project. Up until now, almost all advancements made in the field of medical ultrasound have been made by companies where you have millions and millions of dollars going to R&D. And because of that, there has been a long tradition of prohibitively high prices. We are taking a more gorilla-style approach to the development, which is going to allow us to make an incredibly low-cost device that a lot of third-world countries are going to be able to access the technology. We're really taking a lot of thought in designing a device that doesn't just do the job but does the job in the most culturally appropriate way for them. So I think the people that should think about going into HCDE are those that share our department's interest in the user and optimizing technology and design by understanding the needs and desires of the user.

>> Chris: So this is a vision-based multi-touch system. And I'm in the department of human and computer interaction. So what we're interesting in here is making interaction with the computer more intuitive. So applications for manipulating objects just through touch is a lot more intuitive than using a mouse or a keyboard. Specifically, what this research group does is documents the learning process, so documenting the steps that I took to build the screen and really exploring how people acquire technical skills. And take that information and apply it to education here in the U.S. and also abroad in developing countries. Here we have just a basic kind of a demonstration of the different kinds of things you can do with multi-touch, so if you're looking at pictures and stuff with friends, or you could imagine that if these were documents on a conference table, that you could be sharing information. If you're interested in design, if you're interested in technical writing, if you're interesting in human and computer interaction, then this is your field.