DIY Mushroom Cultivation and HCI Mycology is a branch of biology concerned with the study of fungi. Our most common experience with fungi is in the form of mushrooms, but fungi also include molds and yeasts and in fact constitute an entire kingdom. Mushrooms have long been renowned for their medicinal properties, and research continues [...]
Many DIY mushroom cultivators record time-lapses of mushrooms growing and post them to Youtube. Drawing from this practice and our own desire to produce time-lapses of our crop growth, we developed a conceptual design for a system that could record time-lapses of mushroom growth and sync data logged environmental sensor information to the videos — [...]
Where as the semantic time-lapse system was geared towards building a basic understanding of a mushroom life-cycle, the mycelia run rate estimator system is geared at giving a cultivator a means of evaluation. Specifically, the mycelia run rate estimator system was designed to give a cultivator the ability to construct a quantifiable metric about [...]
These are three instances of Customer Journey Maps. The purpose of these tools is to give designers insight into the experience of a user through a representation of processes and touch points. These are typical to the service design field. (source: http://www.servicedesigntools.org/tools/8) Methodological frameworks, such as User-Centered Design, Universal Design, and Value-Sensitive Design, have been the [...]
Visualizations are mostly created with computers and consumed on the Internet. In spite of this inherently digital context of production and exhibition, there has been a lack of discussion on the influence of computation on visualization as it has played an important role in visual media. I particularly focus on two aspects of visualization—rhetoric and [...]
One focus of the Public Design Workshop is the analysis of DIY Infrastructure, an emerging area of design in which individuals and small groups are building alternative infrastructural systems and modifying or hacking existing ones. For example, Feral Trade Courier (http://feraltrade.org) is a an alternative freight system in which goods are carried over social networks; [...]
Devotional Gardening is a research through design project that examines possibilities of tools that serve a purpose beyond raw functionality. While tools are most commonly used as a means of focusing and harnessing human power for more efficient labor, grafting meanings from one space onto another serves to open the frame of the roles for [...]
Most youth robotics programs emphasize technical content; Our youth robotics programs emphasize speculative approaches to understanding and engaging with robotics.
