A partial selection of projects with credits and primary related publication/exhibition.
Still formaing this and updating with new info....for now here is an older listing *** PLEASE WAIT FOR UPDATES ***.
Redirecting energy usage
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.
The audience is participating
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.
Public expressions of air quality
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.
Singular emotional bits of energy
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.
Explorations in new urban artifactst
Hullabaloo was the first in a series of new public artifacts called Objects of Wonderment that were designed to radically expand expectations of mobile phones as they transform from personal communication tools and begin to interface directly with new sensors, actuators, and physical places. Objects of Wonderment repositions these devises as central elements in a participatory urban authoring toolkit.
Mobile sensing for community action
We have explored citizen science through a range of gallery exhibitions, workshops, and performances. Through new signage, sensing technologies, and urban interactive screens issues of ownership, authenticity, authority, activism, and grassroots participation have been critiqued.
Exposing human traces across our urban landscape
Urban life is largely composed of the movement, activities and familiar patterns of people within and across our crowded urban landscapes. There is also a curiosity, perhaps even verging on a voyeuristic interest in the lives of our fellow urban neighbors. We developed Urban Probes - specifically, Jetsam, to explore urban public trash, its meaning, patterns, and usage, and further critique technology and our emotional experiences of living in cities.
Jabberwocky
The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. Jabberwocky questions the dominant rhetoric of social networking and offers a new lens on our less understood but common social relationship with strangers.
Inevitable dilemmas of the human condition
The I-Bomb directly confronts our reliance on ubiquitous technologies by forcefully creating a technology free zone (TFZ) via a functional electromagnetic pulse device. It also presents dilemmas of personal ownership of unregulated weapons systems and a questioning of technology overreliance and saturation.
Your one stop choice for personal pathogens
Dispersion is a functional personal pathogen vending machine that presents a seductive visual and interactive experience framed within the context of a common vending machine and a resulting ethical and moral dilemma.
Seeing is deceiving
Limelight critiques the culture of fear by presenting a functional technology that automates the process of anxiety and worry. The system uses remote and local sensing with learning algorithms to calculate a fear index. The system predates the US government’s own threat level system.
Interactive wall climbing robots
WallBots are low-cost autonomous, wall-crawling robots designed as DIY authoring tools for public artists and activists. Wallbots enable public expression across a wide range of surfaces and hard-to-reach places, including bus stops, whiteboards, streetpoles, trashcans, moving vehicles, and building walls. They allow dynamic and adaptive positioning of sensors, cameras, speakers, messages, propaganda, etc.
Empowering civic engagement with place based sensors
The recent convergence between low-cost urban technologies and political discourse presents a rich new design space for enabling public participation and expression. This project explores participatory sensing as a resource for activating, authoring, and provoking questions concerning human and urban health and well-being. We envision place-based sensing that invites non-experts to move and leave modular sensors in public spaces, allowing for a range of interactions from personal sensing to more public experiences. We studied sensor appropriation, data sharing, and public authorship across four urban communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people to reveal design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expression and activism.
Public expressions of air quality
People spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors, which makes indoor air quality a major contributing factor towards their health. For non experts, measuring and understanding air quality is difficult without special tools and expensive equipment. We designed inAir, a tool for measuring, visualizing, and learning about indoor air quality. inAir provides historical and real-time visualizations of indoor air quality by measuring tiny hazardous airborne particles, Particulate Matter, as small as 0.5 microns in size. inAir also allows individuals to share real-time air quality readings.
Water quality, conservation, and health
Using a low-cost microphone and micro-controller, we developed a series of water quantity measurement devices capable of providing immediate feedback to users. We deployed these in public restrooms and shared showers to study awareness and behavior change around water usage.
The audience is participating
The “Tele-Actor” is a skilled human with cameras and microphones connected to a wireless network. Live video and audio are broadcast to participants via the Internet. Participants not only view, but interact with each other and with the Tele-Actor by voting on what to do next using a “Spatial Dynamic Voting” (SDV) interface that incorporates group dynamics.
Experiments in personal tele-embodiment
PRoPs are simple, inexpensive, internet-controlled, untethered tele-robots that strive to provide the sensation of tele-embodiment in a remote real space. Numerous airborne blimps and ground robots were developed and deployed across a range of settings including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, Exploratorium, etc. These systems all predate the development of commercial internet telepresence robots by more than a decade.
Experiments in personal tele-embodiment
PRoPs are simple, inexpensive, internet-controlled, untethered tele-robots that strive to provide the sensation of tele-embodiment in a remote real space. Numerous airborne blimps and ground robots were developed and deployed across a range of settings including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, Exploratorium, etc. These systems all predate the development of commercial internet telepresence robots by more than a decade.
www.counterfeit.org
Legal Tender was the first publicly accessible online tele-robotic laboratory where remote viewers give up their anonymity and accept full responsibility for actions they perform on a pair of purportedly authentic US$100 bills. Users are also reminded that it is a Federal crime to deface US currency.
Third tele-robot on the web
Mechanical Gaze was one of the first few internet based online telerobotic websites (pre-dating even the existence of Netscape). It allowed remote users to access a collection of museum exhibits. Users could control the camera viewpoint to facilitate views that they want of objects. It also allowed for running comments on each exhibit and live video of the robot in motion. This was the first color robotic camera on the web as well as the first allowing for more than 3DOF.
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Living Environments Lab • a collaborative research laboratory focusing on the critical intersection of human life, our living planet, and technology
Urban Atmospheres• proactive archeology of our urban landscapes and emerging technology
Experimental Interaction Unit • research into the physical, aural, visual, gestural, and cultural interactions between humans and machines and the various permutations of those interactions
A description of elements of my research can be found by visiting the Living Environment Lab website. These is a (now dated) video of some of our work from 2009: Video Overview 2009
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Living Environments Lab A collaborative research laboratory focusing on the critical intersection of human life, our living planet, and technology |
Urban Atmospheres focuses on our lifestyles and technologies within the context of public urban spaces. Its research challenges differ from those found within the home where technologies readily intermingle across our intimate relations with friends and family members. It diverges from office and work environments where productivity and efficiency often dominate our computing tools. It is also not simply concerned with mobile or social computing. Urban Computing establishes an important new framework for deconstructing and analyzing technology and urban life across five research themes - people, place, infrastructure, architecture, and flow. More information can be found on the Urban Atmospheres page. A few of the projects are listed below.
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Citizen Science |
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Ergo On-the-Go Air Quality Readings delivered to your mobile device |
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Participatory Urbanism Empowering citizens to collectively author, share, and remix measurments from their environment |
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Objects of Wonderment Something wonderful is coming to your city |
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Hullabaloo Creating place based ringtones |
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Urban Score Measuring your relationship with the city |
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AnyPhone Designing mobile phone applications for any phone |
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Sashay Visualizing personal patterns across the invisible geography of cell-towers |
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Exurban Noir Designing for the darker side or urban life |
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Matchbooks Ephemeral anonymous interactions about feelings of urban love and hate |
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180x120 RFID tags and tessellated serfaces generate vidual group dynamics |
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| Metapolis and Urban Life Workshop at UbiComp 2005 |
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Jetsam Deconstructing urban traces |
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UbiComp in the Urban Frontier Workshop at UbiComp 2004 |
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Urban Probes Interventions in Urban Life |
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Jabberwocky Visualzing your Urban Familiar Strangers |
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Street
Talk |
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Familiar Strangers Intel Research Berkeley |
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Intimate Computing
We are interested in understanding intimacy as a theme in ubiquitous computing research and its value to people. In particular creating tools that connect people in novel and meaningful ways and further promote the building and sustaining of relationships to groups and others.
Other Projects