Laura Devendorf and Abigail De Kosnik's paper wins Best Paper Award!

30 Jun, 2016

Laura Devendorf, PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley School of Information and soon-to-be assistant professor at ATLAS Institute CU Boulder, gave a talk at the ACM Conference of Designing Interactive Systems in Brisbane, Australia. Her talk was focused on the paper she co-authored with BCNM’s Abigail De Kosnik, “Indeterminacy and Resistance in Making: Probing the Potential of Post-Antropocentric 3D Printing". It won the Best Paper Award, which is given to the top 1% of papers!

Here’s what Laura had to say about the experience:

I studied art and computer science as an undergrad so new media seemed like a natural fit to explore aesthetic, playful, and/or poetic applications of technology. My research is situated in the field of human-computer interaction, which looks at how people interact with technologies in all of it's forms.

My research explores the role of technology within creative practice. Specifically, how technologies can help people develop new and interesting sensitivities and perceptions of their everyday worlds. I've explored this through a mobile application for creating typefaces from images and videos of one's local environment, a system for 3D printing by hand with everyday materials in everyday places, and the development of dynamic fabrics and clothing that change in response to computational input. I chose to work on my specific research areas because I was reading, in many research projects, work that tried to make computational concepts accessible to artists and designers, which is great, but I wanted to think about it the other way--how we could bring art and design sensitivities to people who may be fluent in technology. I don't see art as a set of techniques or a particular class of objects, but practice that can help us experience our worlds in new and important ways. I'm excited to find ways to foster a conversation between contemporary art in interaction design.

The specific talk was looking at post-war performance art as a lens for reflecting on the design of 3D printers. I presented work from John Cage to talk about benefits, or opportunities that come from, engaging chance in a creative practice. Gail and Kate provided many more examples highlighting various configurations of chance in performance work. One question highlighted how Cage engaged chance, but was very "controlling," one might say, in engaging particular kinds of chance. I thought it was interesting to think about making as a crafting of chance, as opposed to specific kind of material.

The featured image is Laura's Hands in the Land of Machines.