If we can make it there: Notes on urban interaction
Date and time: 31 October 2024, 13:00-14:00 CET
Speaker: Wendy Ju, Cornell Tech
Title: If we can make it there: Notes on urban interaction
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Host: Barry Brown, barry@dsv.su.se
Abstract: Human Computer Interaction is increasingly engaged with the social-cultural context that people live in everyday. The city, in all its grit and glory, provides a complex and rich context in which to understand the challenges technologies face when they are adopted by people in the real world.
In this presentation, I discuss three on-going research initiatives from my group at Cornell Tech in New York City which grapple with interaction in the urban context: Trashbots in the City, Urban Fingerprinting, and Communal eXtended Reality. These projects highlight different aspects of urban interaction–culture, scale, engagement–which demand new approaches from researchers and practitioners in HCI. In this talk, I will also champion the perspectives that HCI brings to the already crowded urban landscape.
Bio: Wendy Ju is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech. She is also an inaugural faculty member of Cornell’s new campus-wide multidisciplinary Design Tech department, and an Associate Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion.
Wendy has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. Her design approach has been influential in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces, where early stage prototyping enables safer and more socially appropiate systems. Wendy’s current research focuses on everyday urban interaction. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Wendy’s monograph, The Design of Implicit Interactions, was published in 2015.