News/Research
11 Feb, 2015

Eric Paulos

Energy Parasites

Energy parasites are handcrafted objects designed to opportunistically harvest small bits of energy across public landscapes. Agnostic to energy origin or ownership, these artifacts redirect their captured energy through a variety of means including expressing it and storing it for later reacquisition and usage.

Spectacle Computing

Increasing engagement and awareness of societal concerns across public spaces and communities with novel, expressive technologies. Using expressive balloons and air quality sensing clothing individuals engage in otherwise socially unacceptable behaviors such as overt public voyeurism, gossip and curiosity.

Wearair

WearAir is an expressive T-shirt that senses the wearer’s surrounding air quality as indicated by the measured volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and publicly express those levels through a series of visually expressive patterns. The T-shirt evokes new public awareness of air quality.

Energy Materiality

Collecting, keeping, sharing, and activating small personal interactive bits of energy. This project is focused on exploring new ways of experiencing and interacting with and through energy in everyday contexts. These artifacts promote new forms of emotional engagement with and attachment to energy. This work speculates on the emergence of new sociotechnical energy regimes—including decentralized modes of energy production and consumption.

About Eric

Eric Paulos is the Director of the Living Environments Lab, Co-Director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, and an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley where he is faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. Prior to CMU, Eric was Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories.