milan101

This was my second course with professor Intriligator. After taking Product Design in Spring I was excited to take his class again and since ENP161 covered so much Human Factors stuff,  my expectations from this course were pretty high. The course covered a whole lot of areas in human-machine interaction field and I learned different in the field of Human Factors Engineering.

The first positive thing about this course was its weekly blog assignment. Pleasant experience? No. Good practice? Yes! It was very efficient in making us reflect on the things we discussed during the  week and sort of worked as a documentation piece for future references.

Building portfolio pieces was another deliberate attempt at documenting stuff and it was nice that everyone had at least four portfolio piece in the end that we can now show to our future employer. The group projects to build the portfolio pieces provided good mental exercise.

If there is something that I would suggest improving is bringing in more industry experts, not for whole lecture period though. May be they can talk about how they apply different human factors knowledge in their professional world for about 10 minutes before we go into discussion on how do we actually do it.

There were moments in the class that made me say “Oh I want to do that”. One of them was the social robot’s class. The social robot is an emerging field and will need a lot of work before we will have robot companions, servants or pets. I would love to be engaged in people doing social robotics stuff. I am not sure what the future holds, but I feel like social robotics stuff is in the intersection of what I care about: education, robotics, programming, having fun.