December 1st I visited Smith College as a guest speaker at the Picker School of Engineering. The School of Engineering is the first of its kind at an all women's college, and as a Smith alum, I wanted to get involved. Smith offers an undergraduate degree in engineering science, taking a multidisciplinary approach. I talked about user centered design and lead a workshop in contextual studies.

I spoke to students in the Design Clinic, a year long course in which students work on industry sponsored projects, to get first hand, real world experience. The projects are all challenging.

We had a great afternoon! The challenge was coming up with tasks which could be observed and analyzed in about 90 minutes. Susannah Howe, their professor, and I wanted to give the students a taste of this technique and we're hoping to repeat and improve upon it for next year's clinic. Yes!

I also accompanied Mary Beth Rettger who spoke at Olin College. Olin opened in 2002 and also focuses on engineering. Mary Beth spoke to the human factors class, where the students were learning user centered design techniques including contextual studies, paper prototyping, usability walkthroughs and creating applications. One of the most interesting aspects of our visit was examining the walls which were covered with project work, huge picture-rich documents which examined how people worked, or analyzing a process in the real world. It had a dynamic and highly creative feel to the campus, and we were pleased to confirm for the students that yes, we do create paper prototypes, we do develop personas and we do usability walkthroughs as part of our jobs.