House-Wi-Fi-zation for the Internet of Things

My thesis for completion of my MFA uses the smart home as a site to deal with the domestic labor done by participants, the gender roles of these tasks, and the invisible maintenance in keeping a home and its IoT systems up-to-date and running.

Propositions

Propositions is a student-run journal/space for thesis students at Media Design Practices to construct and participate in our own unique critical discourse. We want to use this space to generate and sustain criticality in our design and technology practices. What if what we put forth as design is the argument – or proposition – rather than a conventional, market-driven prototype?

http://props.haus 

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Co-edited with Nicci Yin & Godiva Reisenbichler.

AI Noir:
Networked Colluding in the Internet of Things

A design fiction inspired by mafia archetypes about secrecy as part of the neighborhood fabric, and how devices with artificial intelligence can “conspire” in the Internet of Things. 

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Exhibited at Ars Electronica (2017).
Presented at the Post-Internet Cities Conference at MAAT (2017).

Collaborator: Nicci Yin.

Floating Attentions:
Animistic Collaborators in Mixed Reality

An exploration into how subtle interactions with AI entities in mixed reality could literally float at one’s fingertips. Inspired by the idea of keeping information “close at hand,” the AI entities bloom poetic provocations for the creative process. 

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Sketch made part of Phil Van Allen’s design research team towards his research on animistic design.

Presented at the 2017 Sketching in Hardware Conference (deck).

Research documented here.

Depository:
Trash in Augmented Reality

Inspired by our curiosity in “the trash” as an unsorted space and our desire to figure out “disposability” figures into opulent visions of augmented reality, Depository asks: Where does one dispose of their digital objects?

Using the Microsoft Hololens, we propose a new set of interactions for dealing with discarded digital objects: building off AR’s “snap-to-grid” affordance, we imagine that trash floats up to the overlooked space of the ceiling.


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Collaborator: Godiva Reisenbichler.

Micro-Prophecies:
Machine Learning for Future-Casting

Micro-Prophecies is a useless AI project born out of the insight that joint pain precedes storms due to changes in barometric pressure, and the project uses older populations' stories for future-casting opportunities. 

A funded UK study called “Cloudy with a Chance of Pain” inspired me to raise the stakes of using artificial intelligence to not only predict weather outcomes, but possible industrial disasters. What does chaos theory look like if an elder's arthritic omens on the West Coast can be traced to a major power outage on the East Coast?

The project's emphasis is on the narratives told by the elders in order to elevate the voices of this user group and move their role in technology from strictly passive (they are often monitored) and into a more active position, and I used IBM's Sentiment Analysis API to analyze for emotion, tone, and sentiment and with these parameters then "analyzes" the data to create extraordinary outputs.

Grand Transcription Resume Express

Resumes are deceptive and the world operates on multiple subjectivities, but Google Translate is at least somewhat reliable because of its indecipherable machine learning algorithms which is kind of a plus, right?

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A speculative “resume reader” device made for entry into the Ventriloquist SummerSchool.