Since 2003, I have been full professor of computer science and head of the Media Computing Group that I established at RWTH Aachen University in Germany at that time. Before that, I had Assistant Professor positions at Stanford University in Terry Winograd’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lab and at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, after completing my PhD in computer science at Darmstadt University of Technology in 2000. My research and teaching focus since my graduate student days has been in HCI — to make technology more useful by making it easier to use.
In 2007, I took my first research sabbatical and realized that, to continue teaching my students good user interface design with the proliferation of microcontrollers into everyday objects, I had to expand from the mere software side to also include the hardware side of user interface design and technology in my teaching. As a result, I started a Fab Lab at my university research lab, and was surprised to find this to be Germany’s first and, for several years, only Fab Lab.
This lab has since then served three functions: It has been a Fab Lab with open and free access to the local community each Tuesday for 8 years now, giving us a long-lasting path to educate the local public about the potential of personal digital fabrication by trying it out first-hand (fablab-aachen.de). It has also allowed me to teach our HCI/CS students a more holistic view of the user experience that encompasses both hard- and software. In particular, I have been teaching Personal Fabrication in my CS undergrad and graduate classes since 2010 (Multimodal Media Madness undergrad lab, Media Computing Project graduate lab, Designing Interactive Systems II user interface technology graduate class, and Current Topics in Media Computing and HCI graduate research class, e.g., hci.rwth-aachen.de/m3_ss10). Finally, the space serves as our research group's workshop, in which we have since built the hardware prototypes that have helped us with our continuing success in the international HCI research community (we are one of Germany’s top labs in terms of archival publications at ACM CHI, the world’s premier academic HCI conference, since we started in 2003 — see hci.rwth-aachen.de/chi-ranking).
I first met Neil at FAB6 in Amsterdam in 2006, and since then we have been in contact, with me often trying to push the importance of good usability and careful user interface design in the HTMAA/FabAcademy curriculum. :) It was, therefore, an easy decision to join FabAcademy formally in 2015 as the first German University, in collaboration with the HSRW and HRW Universities of Applied Sciences from our region. While I mentored and guided my member of staff Marcel Lahaye first as a student, and in the following year in his local guru duties, I did not partake in the full program myself as a formally registered student or guru since I wanted him to experience his teaching as his own responsibility. Neil and Lass knew me from years back, and were happy to see us join the program in 2015 as a node. In 2018, after returning from another research sabbatical, I changed my general teaching approach, and have since been teaching my other classes in a flipped classroom style — students learn theory from recorded video clips, and I use my time with them in-class to provide feedback on their user interface work in a Design Studio setting. All my teaching has always been group-centered and project-driven, our departments’ student feedback system has consistently rated my teaching significantly above average for our department, and I was awarded the „Computer Science Teacher of the Year“ award from our CS department of 30+ faculty in 2015 for my „compelling and enthusiastic teaching“. Our class videos are on iTunes U as video podcasts.
Over the last few years, our HCI research has also focused more and more on Personal Fabrication — in particular, on the intriguing question of what the design tools could look like that enable non-engineers to create objects of their ideas to then digitally fabricate. I have begun to call this research area „Personal Design“, and currently we are working on several funded research projects with a combined budget of over 1M€ that look into this topic. These projects include efforts to integrate Personal Fabrication into German university curricula (fab101.de).
I am also the author of the creative commons booklet „Arduino In A Nutshell“ that has been downloaded over 170,000 times since I published my first version in 2012 (during another research sabbatical - I’m seeing a pattern here), and I taught countless Arduino workshops to all kinds of audiences from school kids, to CTOs, to steampunk artists (arduino-in-a-nutshell.cc).
My Flipped Classroom approach has given me extra energy to connect more directly with our students, and I am excited to join this year’s teaching staff again in a more official role, to „fill in the blanks“ especially in the area of electronics, PCB design, and microcontroller programming, which is still a bit scary to our software-oriented CS students but to which I’ve had an affinity since my teenage days, and to provide my general experience from 20 years of teaching university students. Marcel, who started his PhD with us in 2018 and graduated from Fab Academy in 2016, will be doing most of the day-to-day teaching with this year's students.
Since 2018, we have been crediting students taking Fab Academy at our lab with 12 ECTS credits, through cross-listing Fab Academy with official, flexible lecture and lab courses in our CS curriculum.
Also since 2018, I have been holding a recitation in Fab Academy on "How To Make (Almost) Anything Usable". It's a review of some basics on user interface design and usability that help students make their products more focused on user's needs and contexts of use, and thus more successful.