Featured Projects
Below is a list of projects that I have worked on over the past couple years. These projects employed a variety of methods and techniques to develop creative human-centered solutions to complex design problems.
Personal Inventories
This ongoing project explores levels of attachment people have with digital & non-digital things in their home. The ultimate goal is to develop design insights and concepts that engender meaningful--and more durable--human-product relationships. I won 1st place with this project in the CHI 2008 Student Research competition.
Energy Challenge Eco-Visualizations
The Energy Challenge project aimed to reduce the electricity and water consumption of the 10,000+ student dormitory occupants through persuasive eco-visualization. Initial impact reduction from behavior change was successful and we developed several new design concepts for next year's competition.
Imagine Cup 2008 IxD Competition
This 24 hour interaction design competition in Paris, France required us to digest a complex design problem, develop a system of design concepts catering to several diverse stakeholder groups, and then present our process, outcomes, and argument to an esteemed panel of judges. We won 1st place.
Ambient Plant Pot
This ongoing project explores the everyday lives of senior citizens to investigate how ubiquitous technology can build on already familiar practices to subtly stimulate social connectivity among separated friends and family members. Based on in depth user research, we designed an ambient plant pot prototype.
Senior Travel Buddies
This project was selected as a finaist for the CHI 2007 Student International design competion. There were over 50 entries from 13 different countries in this competition. Our project details how to improve the health of senior citizens, while reducing the environmental impact of their driving habits.
Sustainable Bloomington
This project began as a semester long service learning project in partnership with Bloomington’s Sustainability City Initiative. Our goal was to produce a strategic design plan for promoting awareness and advancing actions that ensure the city’s sustainment.
Holy River Ganga
The goal of this project was to design a universally accessible, educational museum exhibit, with a focus on user experience. After using a variety of bodystorming techniques to empathize with the needs of disabled users, we designed an interactive voyage down the holy Ganges River in India.
My Disney Memories
Poised with the problem of designing an information system that would be implemented at DisneyWorld and result in new user experiences, we developed a novel way of capturing, storing, and sharing amusement park memories. Our process was characterized by heavy user involvement and rapid iterations.
Chinese Photoplay
This website was developed as an instructional component for the Indiana University Folklore/Ethnomusicology course (F305) on Chinese Film & Music. The problem posed was to create a multimedia website offering a film critique of two popular Asian movies featuring Chinese minorities.
Usability Testing
This project was completed as part of a human-computer interaction evaluation methods course. The problem posed to our team was to conduct an in depth, formal usability evaluation and heuristic analysis of Indiana University's knowledgebase system. Our findings were presented to knowledgebase developers.
All Other Projects
A variety of other projects I have worked on including online ethnographic research, web database development and a variety of prototyping projects are displayed in this section with short descriptions.