TEI 2010 Conference

Over Wintersession I had the immense privilege of working with designer and MIT Media Lab student Richard The on the design of the TEI 2010 conference materials. Based on Richard's striking design of the proceedings, tote bag and poster, I worked with Richard to develop designs for the conference's t-shirts, name tags, demo signs, daily schedule posters, and some of the tote bag inserts.

Overall, it was an incredibly enjoyable challenge and it's great to see our work in the hands of so many people! The conference began today, January 25th, and so far is offering a great opportunity to see some of the phenomenal research taking place in Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interfaces. As always, I feel incredibly lucky to have access to the MIT Media Lab, Wellesley College, to such talented mentors, designers and researchers, and to all of these fascinating opportunities in emergent HCI.

The Davis Experience: An iPhone Application

I finally concluded development on the first prototype for my independent study in mobile phones and the museum experience. Conveniently, this project complemented my research for my Tangible User Interfaces project, described below.

My primary goals were to create physical engagement with the space of the Davis Museum, critical engagement with the collection, and social engagement with the greater community of visitors. To do so, over the semester I developed an informative - yet game-like - iPhone application prototype that brings users through the process of finding related works in the museum, responding to them, and seeing the responses and insights of others.

Demonstration of Davis Surface Application

For my Tangible User Interfaces course at Wellesley College, I and my teammates Helen Wu and MaCherie Edwards created a Surface Application for use in the lobby of Wellesley's Davis Museum. Its purpose is to allow users to prepare themselves to engage with the works in the museum, and allow them to debrief afterwards in a social manner.

In the application, users can choose works of art from the collection and respond to selected prompts by sketching over the artworks themselves, and saving them to the database. These responses can also be retrieved by placing a "responses token" on the Surface, which will populate some of the most recent responses on the screen. This style of interaction is geared towards allowing users to collaboratively engage with the museum's works without replacing the museum viewing experience itself.


Undergraduate Research @ MIT Media Lab

This semester I've had the fantastic opportunity to work with Rob Morris, graduate researcher in the Affective Computing Department of MIT's Media Lab, on a series of mini-games designed to help alleviate phonophobia in autistic children via exposure therapy. My role has been to develop a series of games with built in volume controls and customizability to serve this distinct population.

As a first foray into AS3 I'm quite pleased, and particularly by the potential for these games to legitimately help people. During the Introduction to Videogame Studies course taught by Dr. Doris C. Rusch at MIT, guest Dr. Mario Lehenbauer presented findings that exposure therapy experiences in videogames are apparently effective, so it's quite thrilling to be a part of researching this in a specific demographic.


Tanner Conference Presentation

This semester I had the privilege of participating in Wellesley's Tanner Conference, which "provides a venue for students and alumnae to reflect critically upon, analyze and share their off-campus experiences with others in the College community." I presented with five of my peers on our summer internships in computing fields, in a panel titled "Real-World Applications: Internships in Computing, Engineering, and Human-Computer Interaction."

It was really amazing to hear first-hand about some of the amazing things my peers are doing (such as Alex Olivier, who developed a system to help babies with MS learn how to crawl), and to share what I learned while interning in user experience design at Apple, Inc.