4. bio
a. background
After recieving my B.A. in studio art from the College of Wooster I began to continue where my capstone film had left off - animation. This led me to begin working with (at that time) Macromedia Flash. That work developed into creating websites for local bands, which in turn led me to designing websites without Flash (ie using HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL). This work became more in-depth, with the design of full blown applications (Java) being added to the milieu and led to the eventual founding of my personal consulting company, RogueScholarMedia (archived site available here) in 2005.
After several years of self-employment, I took on the role of art director at Not So Modern Drummer and began to organize the layouts for the magazine, maintain their web presence, and hanging out with and photographing rock stars. In many ways a dream job, I wanted to pursue the more technological aspects of what I had started as a freelancer and when the magazine moved to Nashville, I decided to pursue further education.
I began my graduate studies as a Master's student in 2010, studying HCI and interaction design. This led to an internship at Adaptive Path where I worked on the UN's Global Pulse Hunchworks Initiative and other consulting projects. I received an offer to pursue a PhD and saw this as an opportunity to combine the more tangible aspects of what I had learned during my B.A. with my newly acquired taste for research by way of tangible interactions and research through design. Since then, I have carried over theories from art as well as practical skills from my previous work over to researching under the NSF CreativeIT Grant and the Intel ISTC for Social Computing.
Working on Hunchworks at UX Week 2012 (I'm in the bottom right corner)
b. education
- Present Ph.D. Student, Human-Computer Interaction and Design,
Indiana University, Bloomington
Area(s): Materiality, Tangible Computing, User Experience, Socio-Technical Systems
Minor: Anthropology
Advisors: Professors Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell - 2003 B.A. with Honors, Studio Art,
College of Wooster
Independent Study (IS) honors
Area(s): Photography, Film, Installation Art, Conceptual Art
c. honors/awards
- Best Paper Nomination
ACM Internation Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2015 - Best Paper Nomination
ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) 2014 - Women in Informatics and Computing (WIC) Award
For contributing to the empowerment of women in computing as an instructor - Finalist
Student Design Competition at ACM CHI 2011
d. interests
I still have a very active interest in photography and design, taking day trips to local attractions and photographing them. Additionally, I enjoy tinkering not only as a means of doing research (through design) but also the simple pleasure of taking something apart and repairing or improving it.