Kimiko Ryokai & Team Awarded 1.29M
BCNM would like to give a huge congrats to Kimiko Ryokai and her team for being awarded a $1.29M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to tackle the issue of the underrepresentation of Indigenous groups in museum spaces. Kimiko Ryokai is an associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Berkeley Center for New Media.
Kimiko's work on technologies to support creativity and learning has been funded by NSF, Nokia, and Google, and has been presented at the premier HCI conferences including CHI, SIGGRAPH, Creativity & Cognition, IDC, Ubicomp, and CSCL, winning several best paper awards. Kimiko is also an award-winning designer and inventor (IDSA Gold Award) and has exhibited at international venues such as Ars Electronica, Children's Museum Kyoto Japan, AIGA, and IDSA. Kimiko received her MS and Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT in 1999 and 2005 respectively. Before joining UC Berkeley, Kimiko worked at IDEO as an interaction design and human factors specialist.
Their project, titled “Supporting Rightful Presence in Museum Spaces: Youth as Participatory Designers of Indigenous Mixed Reality Science Exhibits,” advocates for collaboration between local Indigenous groups and the University’s researchers to reach a common goal: engaging the youth and preserving cultural teachings. The team — composed of researchers from the Lawrence of Hall of Science, School of Information, and Ohlone cultural association Cafe Ohlone — hopes to create more welcoming and inclusive informal science learning spaces for Indigenous youth and foster a sense of rightful presence or belonging throughout this three-year-long project.
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