Profile

I'm a technological theorist and critical designer. I like to think about how we can make technologies and technological interaction deeper, richer, and more emotionally engaging. By using art practice and cultural theory to inform design methodology, technological devices can become more fundamentally a part of holistic humanistic experience, or suggest critical engagements within existing practices.

Experience

Researcher

Culturally Embedded Computing Group

2004-2006

As a member of Phoebe Sengers' Culturally Embedded Computing group, I helped with design research, ethnographic evaluation, and philosophical grounding for many research systems. In particular, I was involved with the Affector, an interface for emotional contact between office workers; the Home Health Horoscope system, which used a network of discrete sensors to write fortunes for a family based on how it understood the mood of the household; and Loki, a chatbot that seeks to foster intra-ofice communication via spreading only-slightly malicious rumors. My specific research focus was trying to understand how user/designers help to create meaning in the systems that they are developing for their own use.

Teaching Assistant

Computing Cultures
S&TS/INFO 351

Spring 2006
I helped to formulate lesson plans and syllabus, led student group leaders for discussion, broke out groups of students for design challenges, and graded papers.

Course description:

Computers are powerful tools for working, playing, thinking, and living. Laptops, PDAs, webcams, cell phones, and iPods are not just devices, they also provide narratives, metaphors, and ways of seeing the world. This course critically examines how computing technology and society shape each other and how this plays out in our everyday lives. Identifies how computers, networks, and information technologies reproduce, reinforce, and rework existing cultural trends, norms and values. This course looks at the values embodied in the cultures of computing and consider alternative ways to imagine, build, and work with information technologies.

Teaching Assistant

Intro to Web Design & Programming
INFO/COMS 130

Fall 2005

As an evaluation TA, I graded student projects and helped to design the curriculum for the course, as well as holding office hours to assist students one-on-one with their web development problems.

Course description:

The World Wide Web is both a technology and a pervasive and powerful resource in our society and culture. To build functional and effective web sites, students need technical and design skills as well as analytical skills for understanding who is using the web, in what ways they are using it, and for what purposes. In this course, students develop skills in all three of these areas through the use of technologies such as XHTML, Cascading Stylesheets, and PHP. Students study how web sites are deployed and used, usability issues on the web, user-centered design, and methods for visual layout and information architecture. Through the web, this course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of information science.

Education

New York University
New York, NY 2008 M.P.S. In Interactive Telecommunications
Design and Technology


Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 2006 B.A. in Science & Technology Studies
Minor in Information Science

Skills

Programming:XHTML/CSS, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Java, Processing
 Electronics:Circuit design, microcontroller programming (AVR and Arduino)
Fabrication:Quick prototyping, woodworking, casting and molding.
 Software:Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign

Writing