Bill Verplank is an interaction designer, human-factors engineer and
visiting scholar at Stanford University. He studied mechanical engineering
and product design at Stanford (1960-1965) and returned there to teach
"visual thinking" with Robert McKim (1971-1974).
His PhD (1965-1977) is from MIT in man-machine systems with Thomas Sheridan,
applying information and control theory to measuring human-operator
work-load in manual control tasks. As a graduate student he won MIT's top
teaching award, the Goodwin Medal and built kinetic sculpture at the Center
for Advanced Visual Studies.
At Xerox (1978-1986) he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star
graphical user interface. For seven years, he taught "Graphical User
Interface Design", "Graphic Invention for User Interfaces" and "Scenarios
for Observation and Invention" as tutorials at the ACM SIGCHI conference and
participated in developing the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum recommendations.
From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at
IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design
world; he started calling it "interaction design" instead of "user-interface
design".
At Interval Research (1992-2000), he directed research and design for
collaboration, tangibility and music. At Stanford, during that time, he
worked with Terry Winograd to establish a studio course on Human-Computer
Interaction Design which he taught for five years.
Since 2000, he has been a part-time lecturer at CCRMA, the Center for
Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford, teaching
a course on designing input devices. He also served on the Steering
Committee for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2000-2005).
Links:
What to study? Interaction Design!
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
CHI Studio at Stanford CS Department
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
A Stanford lecture on Interaction Design.
A paper on testing for redesign of the Microsoft mouse.
