Course Components
The course components will contribute to your final grade as follows:
Participation | 20% |
Micro-reviews | 10% |
Coding Exercises | 20% |
Seminar | 20% |
Project | 30% |
Participation
Participation is important: you're expected to attend all classes, demo coding experiments, read the papers, and contribute to class discussions. As a rule of thumb, try to contribute to discussion at least 1 or 2 times each class: ask a question, comment on a topic, clarify a point, etc.
Attendance alone is not enough for your participation mark. You must participate.
Micro-Reviews
Two days before each class with seminar papers, you will submit a compact three-part review of each paper being presented. The micro-review must answer three specific questions:
- What is a specific strength? e.g. Is something very original and innovative? Is some aspect a particularly elegant insight or solution? Was there something surprising that you learned?
- What is a specific weakness? e.g. Is there a weak or flawed assumption? Is there a methodological problem? Is there a better solution to some part? Was some aspect unclear or not fully explained?
- How could you use the results? e.g. Could this justify a research decision? Could you extend or incorporate this in your research? t This could be an idea for a course project.
Each question must be answered in less than 300 characters.
All micro-reviews will be made public to the class after the submission deadline (with the first name of each student).
Seminar papers are marked with an 'id' consisting of the first author's name and year (e.g. "smith95").
You do not need to do a micro-review for the paper you are presenting on, for any paper or seminar not marked with an 'id', or for any related papers.
Coding Exercises
You'll experiment and extend the code and techniques from coding workshops (and possibly take-home exercises) to create an artwork-like coding "sketch". The goal is to demonstrate some innovation and competent execution of both an artistic aspect (the "concept") and in how the code was implemented (the "technical"). At the start of the following class, you'll demo your coding sketch for the class and say some words about your concept and technical approach.
Seminar
Every student is required to lead one 40 minute paper seminar and discussion.
Sign-up
You can request specific seminars or even certain days for your seminar. We'll do our best to assign you to one of these.
Instructor Review
You must submit draft presentation slides before 9am on Monday before your presentation day for the instructor to review. Comments will be returned before 5pm Monday.
Seminar Format
Use the paper content and examples as a way to introduce and address questions that go beyond the paper itself:
- Establish a context for the paper. Who are the authors (briefly)? What's the problem area? What is the relevant background? Why do we care? Why is the problem interesting, and why is it deep?
- What's the big idea and contribution of the paper? Why do you think the paper was accepted?
- How effective are the paper's results and/or ideas? What are the strengths and weaknesses?
- What are other related papers? Look for other papers by the same authors, references, and later papers that cite this one.
- What are potential applications, extensions, and/or future work?
- What did you learn? How could this paper apply to your course project?
As a rough guide, keep specific summary of information in the paper to less than a third of your talk and the rest for answering the questions above. Spread the specific content of the paper around and use it to ground the discussions of the more important seminar questions. Remember, everyone in the class will have read the paper ahead of time to create their micro-reviews, so everyone already has a good grasp of what the paper is about. Whatever you do, do not simply give a summary of the paper contents (the grading rubric below makes it clear you will not do very well if you do).
If you find that your slides cover all sections of the paper in the same order in which they appear, and you only show figures and tables from the paper, then you are creating a summary presentation. Don't do that.
Class Discussion
You are responsible for leading discussion during (and perhaps after) your presentation. Be prepared to get the class started by seeding the discussion with open-ended questions and some controversial statements.
You'll have access to the class micro-reviews at least 24 hours before your seminar, so budget some time to read through them, and summarize the responses on your slides. You are encouraged to call on specific individuals in the class during the discussion to expand or justify their responses (you'll have their names associated with the micro-reviews).
You'll have to manage the class: this means keeping people on topic, encouraging everyone to speak, and making sure the discussion isn't dominated by a few people.
Length and Structure
You have 40 minutes, but this will include significant class discussion.
- Make your presentation content about 20 - 25 minutes (about 30 slides), but spread this across the 40 minute slot.
- Many of your slides will be discussion points. You explain something from the paper, then get the class to contribute their opinions, ideas, etc.
- Use the content of the student micro-reviews, and call on specific people in the class to get their input.
The seminar is graded out of 20 as follows:
- [5 marks] instructor advance review (all materials submitted on time, draft is reasonably complete to review).
- [5 marks] length and delivery (clear speaking, clear slides, on time plus-or-minus 5 minutes)
- [5 marks] paper presentation (should be more critique than summary with relevant and insightful comments)
- [5 marks] leading discussion (questions prepared, micro-reviews summarized, managed class effectively)
Project
The final project is an interactive artwork described in a related "pictorial" research paper with accompanying documentation video. You'll give a live demonstration of your artwork in the final class in a "critique" format.
Proposal
Submit a description explaining your concept and technical approach. Support this with hand drawn sketches and screen captures of initial code experiments.
Studio
Attend studio class to discuss your in-progress project with the instructor.
Demonstration and Critique
You will have 10 - 15 minutes to demo your artwork and field comments from the class.
Pictorial and Video
You'll submit a 5 - 10 page pictorial paper and a 1 - 2 minute video demonstrating your artwork.
A pictorial is style of research paper that emphasizes visual communication (i.e. lots of images). Here's a description from the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS):
Pictorials are papers in which the visual components (e.g. diagrams, sketches, illustrations, renderings, photographs, annotated photographs, and collages) play a major role in conveying the ideas and contributions of a study in addition to the accompanying text.
Here's an example of a pictorial:
Elvin Karana, Elisa Giaccardi, Niels Stamhuis, and Jasper Goossensen. 2016. The Tuning of Materials: A Designer's Journey. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 619–631. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901909