cs.tamu.edu,
Upon entering graduate school, I remained
uncertain about the area of research I should pursue for a thesis. The two decades
leading up to this decision had brought me across a multitude of paths
including art, music, graphic design, web development, business, information
visualization, and HCI. I knew two things for certain.
It had to be visually intensive and humanly affable.
As a result, my thesis research is designing a new interface component for combinFormation. Called the In-Context Slider, it appears in-context when the user wants to observe or adjust a value and does so in a manner that is amiable to both the user's attention and experience (or at least we hope to prove).
Being a member of the Interface Ecology Lab, I've had the opportunity to mix artistic avocations with systematic science, to design interfaces for the playful and the efficient, to explore ideas of embodied interactions that promote social invitation, and to bridge disciplinary domains improving research and understanding. In doing so, I've collected not only a better awareness of my own research but also an inflection to my creative process - a bend in my design methodology. A bend away from creating just the beautiful and practical towards designing for the experiential, the expressive, the embodied.