Michael McCurdy, from NASA, San Jose CA, will join us to discuss NASA's effort to incorporate user-centered design into their design process.

Mike is a co-founder of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA Ames Research Center. Since its inception in 2003 the HCI Group has grown to approximately twenty members who design and develop software applications with agency-wide impact. Mike has served as the design lead for several projects, starting with a diverse suite of tools developed by Ames Research Center for the Mars Exploration Rover mission in 2003. He currently leads the design effort and serves as a product manager for the Ensemble suite of mission control applications, a cross-center effort to develop modular software products that provide a tightly integrated user experience.

Mike’s current work is focused on a suite of activity planning tools called the Scheduling and Planning Interface for Exploration (SPIFe), the genesis of which can be traced to hundreds of hours of in-context observation of planning work on the Mars Exploration Rover mission. More recently, the suite was used as the primary science planning toolkit for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, on which Mike also served as a Science Plan Integrator, the console position responsible for planning and integrating daily science requests and modeling available spacecraft resources. The SPIFe toolkit has also attracted the attention of the International Space Station planning community, and is currently considered the baseline for a suite of next-generation planning tools under development for use on the Space Station and future crewed exploration missions.