My Portfolio

This portfolio presents a variety of projects related to human computer interaction design. Please feel free to contact me.

Personal Inventories

Design Research (1st Place)

Energy Challenge

Eco-visualization

Imagine Cup 2008

Interaction Design (1st Place)

Ambient Plant Interaction

Ubiquitous Ambient Display

Senior Travel Buddies

Interaction Design

Sustainable Bloomington

Strategic Design

Holy River Ganga

Experience Design

My Disney Memories

Experience Design

Chinese Shadow Play

Web Design

Knowledge Base

Usability & Heuristic Evaluation

All Other Projects

A variety of other smaller pieces



Methods Used

Personal Inventory
Ethnography
Photography
Affinity diagramming
Ideation
Cultural Sense Mapping


Tools Used

Photographic Cameras
Sketching
Field Notes
Illustrator
Powerpoint


Acquired large amount of field notes from on site observations.

Download my thesis presentation slides (.pdf).


Download my CHI 2008 SRC Poster (.pdf | .jpg)

Personal Inventories

My Masters Thesis design research project further developed a new method for design-oriented fieldwork in the home and resulted in design implications to promote more enduring human relationships with interactive products in the home.


Date: October 2007 - Present
Awards: CHI 2008 Graduate Student Research Competition Winner
Deliverable: CHI 2008 SRC Paper | ACM Interactions Article

The Problem

What kind of relationships do people develop with the things they have at home? What is it that makes them keep and cherish certain things and discard others? And how is it possible to study these relationships in a way that could inform design of durable interactive artifacts? The behaviors implicated in connecting durability to interaction design are diverse, particular, and individual. This project aimed to both (i) create a designerly method for field research in the home and (ii) propose new principles and implications to guide future more durable--and meaningful--interactive product design for the home.

The Process

I explored the range of attachments people have with digital and non-digital domestic artifacts with an eye toward engendering longer lasting interactive product relationships.

I conducted personal inventories in 22 households over the course of several months. During each of these sessions I explored a wide spectrum of attachments participants had with their domestic things. I categorized and clustered this data and used affinity diagramming for analysis. Based on these insights, I proposed several design principles and directions--many of which are still being explored (and moving toward the prototyping stage).

Outcomes

This project was accepted into the CHI 2008 graduate student research competition, which, after several rounds of evaluation and presentations, I won! You can find this initial paper in the ACM digital library, along with a follow-up article written for the ACM Interactions Magazine. We recently had a long paper accepted to CHI 2009, which details personal inventories work spanning the past couple years.

Publications

W. Odom (2008). Personal Inventories: Toward Durable Human-Product Relationships. In extended abstracts of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2008). Florence, Italy. ACM Press, 3777-3782
[Graduate Student Research Competition, 1st Place Winner].

Odom, W. , Blevis, E., Stolterman, E. (2008). Personal Inventories in the Context of Sustainability & Interaction Design. In (Blevis, E., contributing editor, Anderson, R. & Kolko, J., EICs) Forum: Sustainably Ours. ACM Interactions. Volume XV number 5. ACM Press, New York, NY.

Odom, W., Pierce, J., Stolterman, E., Blevis, E. (2009, in press). Understanding Why We Preserve Some Things and Discard Others in the Context of Interaction Design. In proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Boston, USA. CHI ’09. ACM. New York, NY.

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