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Assignment 1 Instructions
COMP3900 and COMP6390, Semester 2, 2020
Instructions for Assignment 1

This document tells you what you need to DO for this assignment and it
explains the learning outcomes of each component of the assignment.
The report template document tells you what you need to WRITE in your
assignment report.
Read BOTH of these documents before you start the assignment.

Submission Details
Marked out of 100, worth 25% of the course total mark
Submit your report on this assignment using the upload point for assignment 1 on our
course’s Wattle page.
Due date: Saturday 22nd August 2020
Introduction
This assignment is about creating an initial design for an interactive computer system
and then using techniques to improve that design.
This is the first of three linked assignments that follow the theme:
Using an interactive system to teach on-line remote users about cultural or
historical exhibits
Your task in this assignment is to look on-line for an exhibit in a cultural or historical
institution that really interests you, and then to design an on-line system that captures
your users’ attention and teaches them about that exhibit.
This assignment is your own individual work. Do not copy anyone else’s work. You
will need to discuss your ideas and your design with someone as part of this
assignment, and you will need to keep good notes about what they said so that you can
acknowledge their ideas.
In this assignment you will use words, images and sketches to describe your design
ideas. You will wait until assignment 2 before your group begins any implementation.
The text in Black font tells you what to do.
The text in Blue font explains the purpose of each specific part of this assignment.


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Assignment 1 Instructions
Instructions
1. Go online and visit a number of cultural and historical institutions and make
notes about how those institutions are improving their websites to better show
their exhibits online during this corona virus crisis. Focus on topics that really
interest you. Example institutions include traditional art galleries, modern art
galleries, museums, technology centres. You might be interested in the
performing arts, you might be interested in historical machines, you might be
interested in war museums, or in peace museums. There are some examples of
institutions that you can visit at the end of this document and you can look for
other institutions that match your specific interests.

In this task you are reminding yourself to look widely at the possibilities before
choosing one of them.
2. Choose an exhibit (examples include a painting or small group of paintings or
photographs, an exhibit of a particular artist’s work, an aeroplane or other
historically significant means of transport, a display in a natural history
museum) and write notes about why you chose that exhibit.

You are making a deliberate choice of exhibit and you are practising explaining
your reasons for that choice. You are understanding the importance of being
able to explain the reasons for your actions.
3. Find two other institutions that have a similar exhibit to the one you have
chosen. Write notes about how those two institutions present their exhibit. For
example, if you have chosen an exhibit of military equipment then you could
look at the websites of the Australian War Memorial (which is in Canberra) and
the Imperial War Museum (which is in London).

At the start of a project it is important to find out what other people or
organisations have already done that might be relevant to you. You are
practising doing on-line research with a specific focus on your chosen exhibit.
4. Your chosen exhibit will have several different contexts in which they can be
understood. Choose two contexts and study these contexts in detail so that you
can build an interesting package of information about the exhibit for each
context. Here are five possible contexts for you to think about, but there may be
others that you find for your specific exhibit.
a. Historical context. What historical events or people does it represent?
Why is it historically important? How does this context relate to events
in today’s world?
b. Political context. What political point of view is represented by this
exhibit? What political events are linked to this exhibit?
c. Artistic context. Is this painting or sculpture an example of a specific
artistic style? Is there something significant about the artistic features of
this exhibit? Is there something significant about the artist?
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Assignment 1 Instructions
d. Cultural context. What does this exhibit tell us about the culture that it
comes from?
e. Technical context. Does this exhibit represent a major step forward in
the development of a particular technology?

You are practising looking for deeper information about your chosen
exhibit. This skill applies broadly in the field of HCI, where you will need
to know the broad contexts of whatever system you are investigating so that
you can ask appropriate questions and make appropriate design decisions.

5. Describe your design idea for an on-line module to teach your users about your
chosen exhibit. Decide who would be your intended users and design your idea
specifically for them.

Present your design idea as a sequence of about 6 screen sketches, with written
explanations of what your users would do and what they would see, hear and
experience. You can write these explanations as captions to the sketches and
you can annotate the sketches with lines, arrows and written comments.

You can use a drawing tool to create these sketches. You can import images or
clip art.

If there are external internet links that you want to refer to (for example, a
video of an interview with the artist, an audio recording of a song, an image of
another similar exhibit) then put a note on the sketch where the link would
appear and write the text of the link in the caption below the sketch.

You will have too much material to include it all in this design idea, so just
choose the most important things to include. Write yourself notes about why
you included some things and did not include other things. This is where you
make your own decisions about the scope of how you present your design idea.

Create a PDF file to contain your sketches and your written explanations.

You are practising the skill of communicating an interaction idea using both
words and sketches.
If your idea consists of a sequence of actions you might draw a sequence of
sketches with captions showing what the user of your idea would do. This is
sometimes called a “Storyboard” and you can find information about
storyboards on the web.
If your idea has a more complex flow then you might want to write annotations
next to parts of your sketches.

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Assignment 1 Instructions
6. Share your PDF with a friend and have a conversation with them about what
they think of your design idea. Manage the conversation like an informal
interview. Show them your ideas, discuss your ideas, ask them what they think.
Make good notes about how the conversation flows and especially about what
your friend says.

In this conversation you are practising explaining your ideas and listening to
critical feedback and comments. You need to engage with them in the
conversation but remain emotionally neutral so that they feel OK about
constructively criticising your work. This is an important skill for you to learn
and practise.

7. Include any changes to your design idea that come from your conversation with
your friend (step 7 above). This includes editing the sketches and text that you
discussed with your friend.

Here you are taking responsibility for modifying your design idea based on the
review conversation with your friend. You are using your own professional
judgement about whether or not to accept any suggestions that your friend has
given you.
8. Write a report on the tasks you have done in steps 1-7 above. Use the report
template that is provided on Wattle for this assignment. This template contains
instructions for the sections that you will write and it also contains the marking
rubric for this assignment.

An important part of finishing a project is writing a report on what you have
done. Here you are practising good clear writing to explain your work and the
decisions that you have made
9. Submit your report as a PDF file using the upload point for this assignment on
the course’s Wattle page.

Suggestions for institutions to visit online
In Canberra we have:
• National Museum of Australia
• National Art Gallery
• National Portrait Gallery
• Canberra Museum and Art Gallery
• Australian War Memorial

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Assignment 1 Instructions
In other parts of Australia you can find:
• National Gallery of Victoria
• Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Western Australian Museum
• Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art
There will also be cultural institutions in countries and cities around the world.

Notes about citing and referencing in these reports

Examples of citing and referencing a document or website
These examples show how you will cite and reference the sources of information that you
have used. Each is a sentence that cites a document or website, with the references below.
A good guide to the Harvard referencing system is on the Monash University’s library
website, at http://guides.lib.monash.edu/citing-referencing/harvard
This guide is very detailed and will be useful if you go on to do Honours or postgraduate
study.

Web site
The painting of Aboriginal actor Deborah Mailman, by Evert Ploeg, is presented in
the National Portrait Gallery alongside portraits of several other prominent Aboriginal
actors and musicians. The Gallery’s web page also contains a link to a video
interview with the Evert Ploeg (National Portrait Gallery n.d.)
Quote from a book
Preece, Rogers and Sharp define interaction design as “designing interactive products
to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working
lives” (Preece et al. 2015, p8).
Conference paper
Dingyun Zhu and colleagues compared two methods of controlling the left-to-right
pan of a remote video camera in a quantitative study which concluded that, for a
hands-busy task, eye-gaze control outperformed head motion control (Zhu et al. 2010)
Journal paper
Seymour and colleagues present a randomized controlled trial of a virtual reality
training system for teaching surgical procedures (Seymour et al. 2002).

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Assignment 1 Instructions
References
National Portrait Gallery (n.d.) Deborah Mailman, by Evert Ploeg, on-line at
www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2000.4/deborah-mailman, accessed 16 February 2018.
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., and Sharp, H. (2015) Interaction Design 4th Edition, John Wiley &
Sons Ltd.
Seymour, N., Gallagher, A. et al. (2002) Virtual Reality Training Improves Operating Room
Performance: Results of a Randomized, Double-Blinded Study, Annals of Surgery vol. 23,
no. 4, pp. 458-464.
Zhu, D., Gedeon, T. and Taylor, K. (2010) Head or Gaze? Controlling Remote Camera for
Hands- Busy Tasks in Teleoperation: A Comparison, in Proceedings of the Australian
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction OZCHI2010, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 300-303.