Congratulating Our Fall 2022 Graduates
Image: Still from Rachel Chen's Magical Music Mat
Congratulations to our Fall 2022 graduates, Rachel Chen, Amanda Barnett, Salih Berk Dincer, Jessica Kim, Yushu Kong, Hin Kwan Kwok, Choyang Ponsar, and Darice Wong! We are so excited to see their future successes.
Designated Emphasis
Rachel Chen
Rachel Chen is graduating with a PhD in Special Education at the Graduate School of Education. In January, she will be joining Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her work integrates microanalyses of everyday embodied interaction with the design of interactive environments. Rachel has conducted extensive video-ethnographic research on the everyday lives of non-speaking autistic children and adults across a variety of educational, therapeutic, and familial contexts. Rachel studies their interactions with people, artifacts, and their environment, as they competently and creatively navigate social life beyond speech. Through design-based research, Rachel develops and empirically evaluates interactive environments that embrace the expressive repertoires of the more vulnerable communicator. Currently, Rachel is developing the “Magical Musical Mat”, a rich environment for improvisation through interpersonal touch and sound. In 2021, she received BCNM’s Summer Research Award for dissertation work developing a platform for non-speaking children on the Autism spectrum. You can read more about Rachel’s research here. Her writing and research can be found in Cognitive Linguistics, Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, Education Sciences & Society, Psychology of Music, and more.
Graduate Certificate
Amanda Barnett
Amanda Barnett is graduating with dual degrees in City Planning and Landscape Architecture. Her work investigates how governance can shape decisions around infrastructure and design. Amanda hopes to explore how generative participation in design processes of the urban environment can be enhanced through technology, and seeks to use interdisciplinary methods of analysis, representation, and data collection. This year, Amanda was awarded a Summer 2022 Research Fellowship for work on a forthcoming exhibit at the Wing Luke Museum, Seattle’s Asian Pacific American history museum, about the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway as it displaced Chinatown/International District residents and businesses and disrupted a diverse, thriving community in the mid-20th century. You can read more about Amanda’s research here.
Salih Berk Dincer
Berk Dincer is graduating with a Master's in Design and a Certificate in New Media. He fuses design, media, and science to redefine the interaction between humans, the environment, and computers. He enjoys working with Tangible User Interfaces. During his education, he worked on various projects where the human body and gestures turned into visuals and haptic feedback. His work was deemed worthy of UC Berkeley Design Excellence Award three times. He recently started working with Smart Materials to create more organic, material, and form-based Tangible Interfaces. In his thesis, he brought a new terminology to the Human-Computer Interaction domain named Expressive Natural Tangible User Interfaces.
Jessica Kim
Jessica Kim is a MDes graduate with a background in Textile Design and Fine Arts. Her research focuses on cultural community development and the convergence of emerging and pre-existing technology. She is interested in the new visual languages that result from the cross-communication between textiles structures in HCI, and Asian-American cultural storytelling.
Yushu Kong
Yushu Kong is graduating with a Masters in Architecture and a Certificate in New Media. As a multidisciplinary designer, she aims to utilize design thinking to serve both physical and virtual environments. Research projects during her studies include a service design project providing hospital assistance with additional family connection for dependent elderly and their distant children, and a user experience design project for reducing food waste in refrigerators and building healthy living habits. Yushu is grateful for the opportunity to be both an architecture graduate student and researcher as well as an explorer, designer and digital artist for the past two challenging years.
Hin Kwan Kwok
Billy Kwok completed the UC Berkeley Master of Design program with his Graduate Certificate in New Media. Throughout his career as a software engineer and product designer, he has been creating physical and digital systems that redefine the relationship between humans and technologies. The majority of his creative work involves emerging technologies and human-computer interactions, ranging from tangible user interfaces to mixed reality experiences. Through the New Media Certificate, he further developed his analytical and critical sense of art from a cultural and social perspective. After graduation, he plans to continue his exploration between art and technology as a Design Technologist. He is especially interested in making the commercial design world more reflective and expressive, like many of the New Media artworks he encountered during his studies.
Undergraduate Certificate
Choyang Ponsar
Choyang Ponsar is graduating with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies. In 2021, Choyang was one of BCNM’s Undergraduate Research Fellows. Choyang worked on Tory Jeffay's project, A Forensic Imaginary. In Choyang’s summer research reflection, she wrote, “My experience these past few months was undeniably valuable in that it was the first time that I as a first-generation college student was able to work on graduate-level research. The new methods of archival documentation that I was exposed to were quite eye-opening for me as an Interdisciplinary Studies student who will soon be pursuing a senior capstone.” To read Choyang’s full reflection and learn more about her research, click here.
Darice Wong
Darice Wong is graduating in Fall 2022 with a BA in Political Science and Media Studies (concentration in digital media), alongside the Undergraduate Certificate in New Media. At Berkeley, Darice pursued an interdisciplinary curriculum exploring the intersections between digital design, media cultures, and sociopolitical change. She was selected for the 2021 Kakehashi Project Young Researchers cohort and involved in multiple media research projects on campus starting as a freshman, including evaluating literature on cross-strait political relations, developing a community mapping studio supported by BCNM, and completing a senior capstone project analyzing Diane Arbus' photographic representation of marginal bodies, under the guidance of Professor Anton Kaes. Outside of her studies, Darice has had the honor of working on design and communications for numerous organizations, such as the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, YWCA Berkeley/Oakland, and Caravan Magazine. Beyond graduation, Darice aims to continue using design and media to tell stories and create meaningful products.