Bill Verplank is an interaction designer, human-factors engineer and
visiting scholar at Stanford University. He studied mechanical engineering
and product design at Stanford (1960-1965) and returned there to teach
"visual thinking" with Robert McKim (1971-1974).

His PhD (1965-1977) is from MIT in man-machine systems with Thomas Sheridan,
applying information and control theory to measuring human-operator
work-load in manual control tasks. As a graduate student he won MIT's top
teaching award, the Goodwin Medal and built kinetic sculpture at the Center
for Advanced Visual Studies.

At Xerox (1978-1986) he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star
graphical user interface. For seven years, he taught "Graphical User
Interface Design", "Graphic Invention for User Interfaces" and "Scenerios
for Observation and Invention" as tutorials at the ACM SIGCHI conference and
participated in developing the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum recommendations.

From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at
IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design
world; he started calling it "interaction design" instead of "user-interface
design".

At Interval Research (1992-2000), he directed research and design for
collaboration, tangibility and music. At Stanford, during that time, he
worked with Terry Winograd to establish a studio course on Human-Computer
Interaction Design which he taught for five years.

Since 2000, he has been a part-time lecturer at CCRMA, the Center for
Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford, teaching
a course on designing input devices. Also, he lectures in Computer
Science for the HCI Studio course.

Links:

I was on the steering committee for a school in Italy: Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

CHI Tech at CCRMA

CHI Studio at Stanford CS Department

Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

my page there

A paper about the course.pdf

A scheme for music synthesis

A Stanford lecture on Interaction Design.

A paper on testing for redesign of the Microsoft mouse.

A paper on testing for design of the Xerox Star.

Human Factors References