Design

Related Faculty

Associate Professor
Human-computer interaction, tangible user interfaces

Recent Publications

Looking at Figure 1a, I say duck, you say rabbit, so let’s call the whole thing off, because it can’t be both. Looking at Figure 1b, though, I say two rows of three X’s, you say three columns of two X’s, so let’s not call the whole thing off, because our disagreement could be reconciled in the form of a mutually valuable insight into the commutative property of multiplication, where the two perceptual orientations are complementary construals of six X’s (ie, 2× 3= 3× 2). Abrahamson and Wilensky (2007) used this example to introduce an educational design framework–learning axes and bridging tools–centered on fostering conceptual insight through setting up students to experience then reconcile ambiguous perceptual constructions of instructional materials. Engaging with these materials, students are to experience different meanings that are each valid in their own right yet initially appear incompatible with each other. The learning goal requires finding a new way of thinking that would accommodate or resolve the conflict, whereby the alternative perceptions become complementary or dialectic rather than contradictory. The educational design principle of learning through reconciling competing perceptual constructions has been applied also to the case of ratio and proportion (eg, Abrahamson, Lee, Negrete & Gutiérrez, 2014). The objective of the current article is to investigate the application of the framework to geometry, in particular to designing activities where students engage in task-oriented embodied investigations into voluminous objects. The idea is that students build these objects themselves, moving from 2D images to 3D structures. 

When you go to a new healthcare clinic in the United States, doctors and nurses pull up your patient record based on your name and birthdate.  Sometimes it’s not your chart they pull up.  This is not only a healthcare problem; it’s a data science problem.

This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation towards speculation that aims to interrogate and ask questions about the broader lifeworld within which speculative artifacts sit, placing the lifeworld (rather than an individual artifact) at the center of a designer's concern. 

Design news

A group of researchers, including the I School’s own Professor Kimiko Ryokai, recently received a grant of $1.29M from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to tackle this challenge.

Led by Professor John Chuang, Info 290: Climate, People, and Informatics seeks to explore the burgeoning field of climate informatics and equip students with the necessary language and contextual knowledge to contribute. 

Would you prefer a chart or text when being presented with information? Ph.D. student Chase Stokes has dedicated his studies to answering this question.

MIMS student Joanne Ma has been awarded the 2021–22 Curtis B. Smith Cybersecurity Fellowship.

Hao Li, a deepfake pioneer and an associate professor at the University of Southern California, is impressed by the Chinese app Zao, which allows you to place yourself in popular television shows and movies with just a single photograph. 

Instead of looking for design solutions to fix existing problems in privacy, I School researchers used speculative design fictions to explore the potential privacy issues that may arise in future uses and adoptions of emerging biosensing technologies.

I School researchers have developed a custom-fit earpiece that that can capture “passthoughts” through brainwave signals from the ear canal, and for the first time demonstrated one-step three-factor authentication.

The smart fabric could be used to create clothes with dynamically changing colors or patterns. But who would wear clothes that double as a computer display? And why? New research explores these questions.

Machines increasingly do humans’ jobs. But what happens when a human performs a machine’s tasks? A new project by doctoral student Laura Devendorf explores that role reversal, with unexpected insights into the creative process how people interact with machines.