At Wellesley College, The Davis Museum is a hub of artistic and cultural opportunity, granting community members firsthand access to world-class art. However, members of the staff and the student body had noticed an unusual trend: when not required or rewarded with food, museum attendance was quite low.

The Davis Museum Experience is a system of mobile, multi-touch and social interfaces to create richer connections between a museum and its visitors. This project provides social incentives for museum visits while guiding visitors through a personal and physical exploration of the museum. In collaboration with Helen Wu, MaCherie Edwards.

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Friends and family loan startup LendFriend was looking to take their idea to a top accelerator in Silicon Valley, and their new approach to lending required a new design. Working closely with co-founder and CTO David Kuchar, we planned the use cases for the site, what we wanted for the demo, and the intended design gestalt. In time for their AngelPad interview, LendFriend had a rebranded logo, completely redesigned site and fully-coded demo.

As a student programmer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, I created two complementary Adobe AIR applications to help Marleigh Norton with her research into conversation in games. Interested in a style of conversational game where the player's only control was timing a button press, Marleigh's goal was to release a tool for the creation and play of such games by any developer.

With this goal in mind, I created an AIR application in which the developer could traverse a visual hierarchy of conversational "nodes," adding children to each atomically. The developer could then determine where the dialogue would progress to based on how many words into a node the player chose to interact. Upon completing the game design, the developer could export a descriptive XML file to their computer. This file could be read in and determine the course of a secondary gameplay application, on which I performed foundational development. In collaboration with Marleigh Norton, Andrew Grant.

The MIT Mobility lab does fantastic work in the mobile aid community, and their recognition worldwide continues to grow. To meet the new demands of popularity and increased research, the lab required the design and development of a website from which they could showcase their projects, people, partners and press and encourage the creation of a larger community. After building a backend through Wordpress to streamline the submission of projects and the sharing of press updates, I designed and implemented a scalable website that is both easy to update and showcases the lab's ongoing work.

The ACM's 2010 conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction required a cohesive look to span their promotional materials, conference hall setup, registration items, and student volunteer shirts. Building on the idea of the tangible, we applied a motif of hands and implements as the cornerstone of the conference's brand, creating a bold yet minimalist look across all materials. In collaboration with Richard The.

Hypersensitivity to sound, often to the point of extreme pain or discomfort, is often reported by persons on the autism spectrum. Treatment by exposure therapy has shown some promise, but customizing the exposure therapy to the particular needs of each person is often a challenging task. Rob Morris of the Affective Computing group is interested in applying the principles of exposure therapy to easily customized, fun, engaging computer games, so that individuals can gradually become desensitized to sounds while comforted by familiar imagery and simple interactions.

To assist this research, I developed three such games in Flash with easily customizable visual and audial assets, so as to suit a specific player's needs and to create a platform for ongoing research. They all included a volume control with 30 gradations of volume, so as to be able to increase more imperceptibly over time. When the player solves a simple puzzle (as found in a memory game, finding game or slideshow game), they are rewarded with visual stimuli while the sound to which they are hypersensitive plays at the set volume. In collaboration with Rob Morris.

We designed an infotainment system for commuters, based on their specific entertainment and information needs. Commuters spend long amounts of time in their vehicles, and want an audio system that provides them a wide variety of entertainment systems efficiently. We believed that this necessitated a clear, streamlined user interface in which core functions are readily accessible and separated from less essential functions.

Users not only needed an intuitive audio interface, but also a clear GPS system that helps them get to their destinations as efficiently as possible, dependent on traffic patterns. We recognized that a car's GPS data, and on-the-go nature, made its infotainment system a key place to receive reminders and contextually add stops directly to the car's route. If a family member sent a request for a stop to the car, the infotainment system could notify a driver safely on the main screen, and the driver could fluidly add a stop to their car's route. In collaboration with Maia Bittner, Serena Wales and Krista Williams.