Announcing the Spring 2022 Conference Grant Recipients
The Berkeley Center for New Media is thrilled to provide small grants to our graduate students to help them share their innovative research at the premiere conferences in their field. We look forward to seeing the work of these students spread across the globe!
Elnaz Bailey
The 2022 ACM Symposium of Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA) | Seattle
Insight XR: Integration of Eye Tracking in Computational Architectural Design in Augmented Reality
InsightXR is an augmented reality application that enables expert and non-expert users to visualize 3D designs and provide feedback to designers using AR technology. Our proposed system currently has two major aspects: an AR platform and Grasshopper components in Rhinoceros. The Grasshopper components facilitate the designer with user feedback results visualization as attention maps and 3D fixation points, by helping designers understand areas with highest attention. In InsightXR users’ feedback is collected using two methods: direct feedback as markups on the 3D model and users’ eye tracking data. In order to understand the user’s attention towards 3D geometries and what spatial elements attract attention we conducted user studies. Our results showed that a high percentage of user’s fixation points are in proximity of their provided feedback. In future, user-generated feedback will be used to inform the generation of new designs using interactive genetic algorithms (IGAs).
Katherine Song
ACM CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) / New Orleans
Towards Decomposable Interactive Systems: Design of a Backyard-Degradable Wireless Heating Interface
Sustainability is critical to our planet and thus our designs. Within HCI, there is a tension between the desire to create interactive electronic systems and sustainability. In this paper, we present the design of an interactive system comprising components that are entirely decomposable. We leverage the inherent material properties of natural materials, such as paper, leaf skeletons, and chitosan, along with silver nanowires to create a new system capable of being electrically controlled as a portable heater. This new decomposable system, capable of wirelessly heating to >70°C, is flexible, lightweight, low-cost, and reusable, and it maintains its functionality over long periods of heating and multiple power cycles. We detail its design and present a series of use cases, from enabling a novel resealable packaging system to acting as a catalyst for shape-changing designs and beyond. Finally, we highlight the important decomposable property of the interactive system when it meets end-of-life.
Haripriya Sathyanarayanan
2022 Planetree International Conference on Person-Centered Care / Anaheim
Poster: Supportive Pediatric Healthcare Built Environment: Value of Co-Design
Statement of Need: About 1.3 million of children and adolescents are hospitalized yearly with a mean length of stay ranging from 4.2 to 5.3 days. Designing healthcare environments that are optimal for young patients of all backgrounds is challenging with its complex technology-intensive environments and ever evolving interactions between people and the environment. It is well understood that Patient Experience and Care are affected by the healthcare built environment with growing evidence linking favorable room design elements to patient satisfaction, stress, and patient health outcomes. Stakeholder engagement is key for operationalization of patient experience, a multi-dimensional construct, and there is a need for increased involvement of children as participants and co-researchers. Hospitalization can cause specific difficulties for young people due to separation from their peers, school, and family with pediatric healthcare facilities having a critical role in offering a supportive healing environment to the vulnerable population, with age-appropriate environments that can address the unique needs and concerns of this age-group.
Impact: The patients’ voice is needed in design mock-ups, simulation, and feedback to meet functional and emotional affordances, and address diversity and equity. The expected outcomes are knowledge on perspectives of hospitalized children to capture their uniquely different perspectives and preferences on design and opportunity to create solutions that resonate equitably with children of all age groups. This research engages directly with children on spatial design and a supportive hospital environment filling critical gaps on children’s potential to serve as agents of architectural knowledge. The study also includes parents and staff to capture their uniquely different and collective perspectives on the pediatric patient room design and patient experience. This study adopts a mixed methods study design with qualitative methods using art-based methods and interviews, and quantitative method of surveys on design.
Practical take-aways: (1) How to engage with children to understand needs that can be supported through design of the healthcare built environment (2) To understand the differences in needs and preferences among the key stakeholders (3) To understand what makes children feel better when in a patient room or what may cause anxiety and stress.
EDRA53 Health Nn All Design / Greenville
Presenter in two workshop sessions and 1 Poster
Behind the Curtain: The Latest in Practice-Based Research
1. PARTNERSHIP MODELS BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND PRACTICE: The aim of this panel is to speak from multiple perspectives—academic, student, practitioner, and industry outsider—about the opportunities and challenges involved in Academic-Practice partnerships, through case studies that share experiences, successful models, and research practice, to initiate the development of a resource guide/toolkit through the Researchers in Professional Practice Knowledge Network.
2. TRANSLATING RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE: Lightning talks will address the understanding of research and practice-based research methods, barriers for the application of research in design practice, and how research methods can be plugged into various stages of the design process to address different needs. Following the talks, pairs of researchers and practitioners (and/or academic and practice-based researchers) will participate in a facilitated conversation on knowledge sharing and research application in their domain. The aim is to address access to and consumption of research, application of findings in design practice, and methods used for communication and presentation. The session will acknowledge challenges in the translation of research into accessible formats for practitioners, capture the perspectives of researchers and practitioners, and address strategies (an action plan) for effective communication and translation of research knowledge in design practice.
3. Poster: Spatial and Environmental Design of Pediatric Inpatient Rooms: Performance Simulations and the Patient Perspective
Molly Nicholas
CSCW / Taipei, Taiwan
Friendscope: Exploring In-the-Moment Experience Sharing on Camera Glasses via a Shared Camera
We introduce Friendscope, an instant, in-the-moment experience sharing system for lightweight commercial camera glasses. Friendscope explores a new concept called a shared camera. This concept allows a wearer to share control of their camera with a remote friend, making it possible for both people to capture photos/videos from the camera in the moment. Through a user study with 48 participants, we found that users felt connected to each other, describing the shared camera as a more intimate form of livestreaming. Moreover, even privacy-sensitive users were able to retain their sense of privacy and control with the shared camera. Friendscope's different shared camera configurations give wearers ultimate control over who they share the camera with and what photos/videos they share. We conclude with design implications for future experience sharing systems.
Creativity and Cognition / Italy
Creative and Motivational Strategies Used by Expert Creative Practitioners
Creative practice often requires persevering through moments of ambiguity, where the outcome of a process is unclear. Creative practitioners intentionally manage this process, for example by developing strategies to break out of creative ruts, or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage these creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of Creativity Support Tools. These strategies represent an opportunity for CST research: to create CSTs that embody emotional and process-focused strategies and techniques. Through interviews with expert practitioners in diverse domains including performance, craft, engineering, and design, we identify four strategies for managing process: Strategic Forgetting, Mode Switching, Embodying Process, and Aestheticizing. Understanding tool- and domain-agnostic creative strategies used by experts to manage their own creative process can inform the design of future CSTs that amplify the benefits of successful strategies and scaffold new techniques.
Vincente Perez
SILLY MEDIA 2022 / The University of Chicago
Life Is Like A Party Shawty: Teezo Touchdown on Respectability, Quality, and Representation
Teezo Touchdown relies on an eccentric persona and elements of surrealism during his 2021 “Rid the Mid” campaign. To promote his music and address the rampant issue of “mid” music, Teezo dips into politics and becomes Mayoral Candidate Touchdown. In this presentation I will examine a few videos from this campaign as well as interviews on his work to argue that Teezo’s music is a chance to engage with Black artists who attempt to wrestle Black meaning away from whiteness and white meaning-making structures via silly and absurdist work that directly addresses its intended audience: Black people. I build upon Raquel Gate’s theorization of the concept of “negativity” and assert that Teezo Touchdown employs “Strategic Negativity” by donning the persona of a mayoral candidate and running a campaign to rid the streets of mediocre music. I want to build upon Gate’s argument that trashy reality television represents a “metaphorical gutter” and argue that Hip-hop, especially the music video, represents the storm drain, a fecund site for exploring culture and life that does not cater to the white gaze. Teezo revels in the Ratchet and employs various negative images to support his inversion of high/low quality measures that could not comprehend how “mid” music represents a crisis.
Taking Teezo Touchdown’s use of “strategic negativity” seriously requires understanding how he intentionally disturbs the notion of the Real by promoting his absurdist work through seemingly serious channels. In other words, silliness is the necessary register to effectively explore who Teezo is addressing, why he uses the political campaign as a mode of address, and how Teezo uses silliness to create Black texts that can challenge white cultural hegemony. If “life is like a party shawty”, then perhaps, whiteness, respectability, and other forms of antiblack affective structures are temporary and more importantly, maybe we can “rid the mid” and let Black meaning be, otherwise.