DMD
Carnegie Mellon University HCI Master’s Studies. January–July 2008
Contextual Inquiry, literature review, software review, concept generation, needs validation, paper prototyping, Fireworks, Flex, touchscreen, Final Cut
Brief
Research, design and build a new approach to dental medicine information systems as my CMU MHCI Master’s final project.
What I did
DMD is a touchscreen interface for use by dentists. It was designed using a wide range of user-centered methods and showed itself to be several steps above commercial software in use by dentists at the time.
Our client was University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, who was interested in pushing the state of the art of dental information systems. Specicially we worked with Titus Schleyer and Thankam Thyvalikakath, both of whom became friends through the project and to whom I’d like to send my regards, if you guys ever happen to be reading this.
We worked in a team of four. My roles in the team were project management, parts of interaction design, all technical implementation, and video demo production.
Interestengly, our design converged on a touchscreen interface about six months before Apple announced iPad.
Outcome
Both Carnegie Mellon University and Adobe found the project interesting enough to do their own writeups about it. Sadly, the Adobe writeup is no longer publicly available. I guess this is because of Flash and Flex are no longer the bleeding edge of technology as of 2018, and they have reorganized their site and marketing materials. You can still find the Carnegie Mellon writeup from the link below.
Over the years since my studies, I’ve received many enquiries from dentists, or people in dentistry business, asking about whether this is a real system, and how they can participate in building and sharing it. My response has been, and always will be: this is an educational project, published in the interest of the general public. Neither myself nor the rest of the team has capacity or interest to put further work into it, but we’ve publicly shared all that we have. If you‘re interested, please take what you see and run with it.