• Employing and acquiring skills in user interfaces beyond the traditional Desktop.
• Getting to know various technologies to solve problems in this field.
• To be able to understand and apply principles in design and evaluation according to HCI fundamentals for future mobile applications.
• Prototyping new kinds of actions between humans and computers

Beyond the Desktop investigates design alternatives to traditional graphical user interfaces. Through the advance of new technologies in our environment ¿ made possible by inexpensive yet powerful hardware and its miniaturisation ¿ and the progressing development of sensors and networking technologies, new forms of Human-Computer  Interaction is made possible.
In this course the underlying "enabling technologies" and their field of application such as mobile, tangible and ubiquitous computing as well as brain-computer interfaces and ambient displays are explained.
These, from a HCI perspective, new areas of tension are amongst other things critically investigated by means of case studies and appropriate methods for designing suitable, innovative user interfaces as well as prototyping and evaluation are presented.

Didactical approach: The course consists of a lecture and an exercise. Subject matters presented in the lecture are to be directly applied in the exercise by their respective task assignments.
The lecture culminates in a written exam. The exercise requires submission of three assignments which can partially be completed in small groups.

Effort for the student (ECTS-Breakdown):

Lecture (50 h):

• Preliminary Talk: 2 hr
• Lectures: 18 h
• Exam preparation and further investigations: 28 h
• Written exam: 2 h 

Practical work (100 h):

• 3 practical assignments (3 x 30 including meetings): 90 h
• Presentation of the results: 10 h

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Total: 150 hours (6 ECTS)