Industrial designers working in traditional media have the luxury of sketching, playing, and experimenting with their materials before constructing a finished product. Designers working with electronics and computers are relatively impoverished. To "sketch" with electronics or computers would typically require extensive training in engineering and ready access to inexpensive parts—requirements that most designers can't easily meet. This deficiency—this inability to work closely with materials before building with them—hampers designers' efforts to make products sensitive to human use. This paper describes an attempt to address this problem in a human-computer interaction (HCI) design studio at a major design school. The course itself was an exercise in design: it worked within severe constraints to address a human need. We describe our attempt to shape the course to meet students' most pressing needs; our students' attempts to work within the constraints of the course; and the outcomes of the course for students and faculty. The paper suggests that the course offers one way to experiment with HCI concepts, produce innovative solutions to design problems, and—crucially—humanize new technologies and the design process."