Critical Infrastructure
Neighborhood Networks
InformalScience.org
MapHub
MapMover
Click! Urban Adventure
Gigapan
Friends of Larimer
Pennsylvania Hearing and Deaf Services
Critical Infrastructure
Critical Infrastructure is a walking/field guide intended for people who, as they move through the built urban environment, want to see and better understand infrastructure—and what stories these systems tell.
The project was conceived during my time as an artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre New Media Institute. It continues to be a long-term project of mine.
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Neighborhood Networks
Neighborhood Networks is a long-term research project that combines community arts, participatory design, informal learning, and engineering to articulate and discover how communities use, or might use, emerging technologies.
The project is a joint project of CREATE Lab and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE), and is funded through a grant from the Intel Corporation.
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InformalScience.org
InformalScience.org is a primary online resource for professionals in the field of informal education. The website is a project of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE), and is funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The NSF funded UPCLOSE to redesign its existing version of the site, to conduct research into the needs, habits and desires of informal educators, and to translate those findings into a technical solution. We collaborated with LotterShelly, a design and strategy firm, to conduct ethnographic and design research, and to create the information architecture and visual design for the website.
The website’s significant new features include an expanded citation database, more complete search functionality, interviews and other original content. The project is currently in its final stages, undergoing integration with other ISERC web properties.
new website (shh—not public yet!)
project brief (.pdf, 1.1 MB)
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MapHub
MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group-managed geographic information system (GIS). MapHub allows users to share information about people, places, and events, to document unseen narratives and histories in theme-based “hubs”.
MapHub began as a project of The Carbon Defense League at The Studio for Creative Inquiry. Our team worked with local community groups to develop MapHub as a new channel of communication between city government and residents. The MapHub solution invites community members to enter information with its simple interface, while transparently allowing public officials access to the data.
Because of its potential value to so many audiences, the University spun-off the project to form DeepLocal. My involvement with MapHub spanned three years, through the first four revisions of the software.
We were among the “Top 40 Under 40” entrepreneurs recognized by American Venture Magazine in 2007.
project brief (.pdf, 512 KB)
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MapMover
The Carbon Defense League and MapHub exhibited MapMover as part of Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Our installation consisted of two parts: a system to collect field recordings from the city of Pittsburgh, and a physical device in Karlsruhe to display them.
Participants in Pittsburgh made recordings around the city using their mobile phones. They input the location of the recording by GPS coordinate, street address, or intersection. The recording was then uploaded to the MapHub system, accessible for playback or comments.
For the physical device installed in Karlsruhe, we collaborated with artist Greg Baltus to create a robotic mechanism that played the recordings in real time. It moved an LED marker behind a translucent, wall-mounted map to the location of each recording as it was played.
The exhibition was curated by Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour, and Steve Dietz, and a companion anthology (also titled Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy) was published by the MIT Press in September 2005.
video of mapmover at ZKM (.mov, 17 MB)
project brief (.pdf, 740 KB)
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Click! Urban Adventure
Click! Urban Adventure is a mixed-reality, live action role-playing game that was jointly developed by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE) and the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.
The program teaches middle-school girls important STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills in the framework of role-play as a crime scene investigator. “Agents” navigate through the city, visiting various locations to solve a topically relevant “mystery” in the city of Pittsburgh. The experience was augmented by technology including tablet PCs, RFIDs, GPS, digital cameras and cell phones.
My involvement with the project spanned two years, from research and development (including four extensively tested iterations) to implementation. The program is now owned and operated by the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.
project brief (.pdf, 392 KB)
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Gigapan
Gigapan is a platform to share gigapixel panoramic photographs from around the world, taken with a special robotic mount and a standard digital camera. Gigapan is part of the Global Connection Project, a project of Carnegie Mellon University and NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The Global Connection Project hired DeepLocal to develop a website that would serve as the public outlet to share the images. We met with stakeholders to understand their vision and research interests, and then facilitated a participatory design workshop to develop a human-centered solution. With the insights from the workshop, I led the engineering of the technology. GigaPan now appears as a layer in Google Earth.
project brief (.pdf, 658 KB)
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Friends of Larimer
Friends of Larimer was initiated in collaboration with Alexandra Woolsey Puffer, a graduate student at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, in the context of human-centered design methods and civic engagement. It was created to encourage a more favorable environment for social change in a stressed Pittsburgh neighborhood.
Our research methods ranged from collecting and cataloging litter to attending church dinners as participant-observers in neighborhood life. We led hopeful, creative workshops for youth to express their ideas for improving the neighborhood, which culminated in postcards sent to the Mayor of Pittsburgh.
project brief (.pdf, 1.2 MB)
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Pennsylvania Hearing and Deaf Services
Pennsylvania Hearing and Deaf Services (HDS) came to the Information Systems Department at Carnegie Mellon University to replace their DOS-based interpreter scheduling system.
Our team met with stakeholders to understand the current system and business process. We used storyboards to share and validate our vision to create a more visual, web-based scheduling system that could streamline and integrate HDS’ business processes.
The redesigned system is tightly integrated with HDS’ other software used for accounts payable and accounts receivable. It features a more intuitive, calendar-like display of appointments to reduce scheduling errors, data entry effort and staff frustration.
project brief (.pdf, 588 KB)
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