About this course

Traditional medical care focuses on fixing sickness but doesn’t do a very good job of helping prevent it. Self-care solutions that help us take better care of ourselves have the potential to improve our health and well-being, and may keep us from experiencing the consequences of chronic disease, or even reversing it. The sensor and self-tracking revolution is changing our understanding of data and ourselves. We need new systems that collect, understand and interpret this data to help us know ourselves better and make better choices in light of that knowledge. How might we design a self-care system that engages us in our own monitoring, goal setting, experimenting, reflecting and understanding as it relates to our bodies, minds, emotions, relationships and environment?

Since self-care applies to all of us, you will focus inwardly on your own needs and situations. The goal of the course is to design a self-care system that helps you take stock of yourself by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon your health and lifestyle. You will be making interactive interfaces, visualizations and feedback systems that use existing technologies and methods to support your health and well-being.

You will employ design techniques to develop problem statements, generate concepts, prototype, and then test and refine your solutions to evolve them into high-fidelity prototypes that use sketches, scenarios, videos and user journeys to convey the complete user experience. The emphasis is on the lightest weight prototype, which works through the solution over actual implementations in software and hardware. Significant portions of class time will be set aside for teamwork, designing and critique.

Taught by Steven Dean, steven.dean@nyu.edu, @sgdean on Twitter
Monday, 9:30am – 12 Noon