Design Research

‘Ambient storytelling’ — part of the design philosophy of USC’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab — represents a departure from customization algorithms familiar to discussions of pervasive computing. Rather than thinking about how a car can play the role of glorified butler, anticipating its driver’s every need, instead we reposition the car as co-participant in an… Read more »

February 8, 2012

This project consists of a series of workshops designed to explore new models of live audience interaction. I am interested here in tinkering with the interactional rule-set of audience-performer-interaction. In November of 2011 I collaborated with Kevin Driscoll and A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz on a workshop titled Occupy this Seminar. The approach here eschews technologically… Read more »

I was a collaborator on 6under60, an installation at the Shenzhen Urbanism/Architecture Bienanale in 2011. As a key member of the interactive design team, I directed recruitment and outreach to our collaborator cities, led design of the metadata architecture for both installation and web interfaces, co-designed the concept and user experience of the installation and website, built a metadata collection interface,… Read more »

February 7, 2012

The Movie Tagger project (a continuation of work described here and here) was initially inspired by a grand vision to parse and richly tag every movie ever made. With an eye toward exploring new models of folksonomic “expert-sourcing”, I set out to interview 12 film different scholars in order to adapt their research to metadata tagging schemas and… Read more »

Completed for Phil van Allen’s New Ecologies of Things course at the Art Center, this project presents prospective interactants with a touch interface that doesn’t “want” to be touched. When touch screen interface devices are found in the wild, their shielding appendages haven’t been clipped yet. As you might expect, these appendages have to be… Read more »

I’m interested in interactive systems that get completed by leaps of imagination or by social mediation. One example I’ve pointed to is the elevator close-door button. This is a device that is often non-functional yet nevertheless encourages us to assign causality even where there is none. Building on this the idea, I created a responsive… Read more »

This project explores what happens to on-the-street interviews when they are driven by live online audiences. Drawing on McLuhan’s imagery of electronic media as prosthetic extensions, I designed a platform that lets online audiences conduct collaborative “on the street” interviews without actually being “on the street.” A hybrid mobile and browser-based interface enabled live audiences to speak through an intermediary wielding a camera and a phone…. Read more »