Berkeley HCI Group

This list was last updated 22 June 2019.


Prelim Reading List

The UC Berkeley EECS HCI Preliminary exam is an oral exam that PhD students are required to take after their first year of graduate school in EECS at UC Berkeley. The exam will test your knowledge across a range of research literature detailed below. During the exam you may be asked to explain the central concepts, describe why the paper made certain tradeoffs, integrate several readings in a response to a question, or provide a higher-level explanation of a research area across several papers. In the case of methodological readings, you may be asked to work through a hypothetical design or analysis scenario. Students taking the HCI Prelim Examination will be responsible for having a deep working knowledge and be able to formulate arguments, positions, and situate the work within an historical context. Exam questions will be scoped across the following material (listed by date of publication).

< 1990

  • Bush, Vannevar (1945). "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945) pp. 101-108. (PDF)
  • Stuart K. Card, Allen Newell, and Thomas P. Moran. 1983. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. L. Erlbaum Assoc. Inc., Hillsdale, NJ, USA. (Chapter 2 The Model Human Processor).
  • Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire, T. W. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. American Psychologist, 39(10), 1123-1134. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.10.1123
  • Edwin L. Hutchins, James D. Hollan & Donald A. Norman (1985) Direct Manipulation Interfaces, Human–Computer Interaction, 1:4, 311-338, DOI: 10.1207/s15327051hci0104_2

1990

2000

  • W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter. 2001. At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '01), Gregory D. Abowd, Barry Brumitt, and Steven A. Shafer (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 256-272.
  • Paul Dietz and Darren Leigh. 2001. DiamondTouch: a multi-user touch technology. In Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 219-226. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/502348.502389
  • Carroll, J. (2003). HCI models, theories, and frameworks : toward a multidisciplinary science. San Francisco, Calif: Morgan Kaufmann (Chapter 7 “Exploring and Finding Information” by Peter Pirolli.)
  • Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman. 2004. The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 223-230. DOI= [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/985692.985721
  • Ko, A. J. Myers, B. A., and Aung, H. (2004). Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Rome, Italy, September 26-29, 199-206. https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2004.47
  • Jefferson Y. Han. 2005. Low-cost multi-touch sensing through frustrated total internal reflection. In Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 115-118. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1095034.1095054
  • Maryam Tohidi, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, and Abigail Sellen. 2006. Getting the right design and the design right. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '06), Rebecca Grinter, Thomas Rodden, Paul Aoki, Ed Cutrell, Robin Jeffries, and Gary Olson (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1243-1252. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1124772.1124960
  • Scott R. Klemmer, Björn Hartmann, and Leila Takayama. 2006. How bodies matter: five themes for interaction design. In Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems (DIS '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 140-149. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1142405.1142429
  • Martin, D. W. (2007). Doing psychology experiments. Cengage Learning. (Chapter 2 and Chapter 12)
  • Ben Shneiderman. 2007. Creativity support tools: accelerating discovery and innovation. Commun. ACM 50, 12 (December 2007), 20-32. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1323688.1323689
  • Yesterday's Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing's Dominant Vision. Bell, G. and Dourish, P. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 2007. 133-143.
  • John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and Shelley Evenson. 2007. Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 493-502. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240704
  • Ron Kohavi, Randal M. Henne, and Dan Sommerfield. 2007. Practical guide to controlled experiments on the web: listen to your customers not to the hippo. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 959-967. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1281192.1281295
  • Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish. 2008. Designing games with a purpose. Commun. ACM 51, 8 (August 2008), 58-67. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1378704.1378719
  • Sunny Consolvo, David W. McDonald, Tammy Toscos, Mike Y. Chen, Jon Froehlich, Beverly Harrison, Predrag Klasnja, Anthony LaMarca, Louis LeGrand, Ryan Libby, Ian Smith, and James A. Landay. 2008. Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1797-1806. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357335
  • Paul M. Aoki, R. J. Honicky, Alan Mainwaring, Chris Myers, Eric Paulos, Sushmita Subramanian, and Allison Woodruff. 2009. A vehicle for research: using street sweepers to explore the landscape of environmental community action. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 375-384. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518762
  • Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios. 2009. Predicting tie strength with social media. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 211-220. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518736

2010

  • Michael S. Bernstein, Greg Little, Robert C. Miller, Björn Hartmann, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger, David Crowell, and Katrina Panovich. 2010. Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside. In Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 313-322. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1866029.1866078
  • The Design of Search User Interfaces, Marti Hearst, 2010. Chapter 1 from Search User Interfaces.
  • Neil Patel, Deepti Chittamuru, Anupam Jain, Paresh Dave, and Tapan S. Parikh. 2010. Avaaj Otalo: a field study of an interactive voice forum for small farmers in rural India. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 733-742. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753434
  • Jacob O. Wobbrock, Shaun K. Kane, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Susumu Harada, and Jon Froehlich. 2011. Ability-Based Design: Concept, Principles and Examples. ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 3, 3, Article 9 (April 2011), 27 pages. DOI=[http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1952383.1952384
  • Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, Design and Redesign, first published in Malofiej 22, Annual Book, Mar 27, 2015, Medium and PDF .
  • Hinckley and Wigdor, Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications, Third Edition, Chapter 6: Input Technologies and Techniques, ISBN 978-1439829431, pages 95-132, CRC Press (2012).
  • Munehiko Sato, Ivan Poupyrev, and Chris Harrison. 2012. Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 483-492. DOI: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207743
  • William Gaver. 2012. What should we expect from research through design? In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 937-946. DOI: has [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208538
  • Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Chapter 1: The Psychopathy of Everyday Things, (pages 1–36) (2013 version).