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* Projects...
Apr 2008

GRaIN, the Global Responsibility and Innovation Network, is an organization connecting practitioners of
sustainable development across academia, industry, and civil society. Recently formed, GRaIN represents an organizational mechanism for uniting members of a wide variety of disciplines in a common conversation around the practice of design for global development.

Apr 2008

$10 educational computers already exist in India and China, but they lack genuinely effective educational software. SML is building an initiative to support the development and distribution of effective educational software which is designed to function on ultra-low-cost computers.
Jan 2008

Design for Development: Developing Technologies for Developing Economies was an experimental UCSD course taught remotely from India, via Skype. 20 students from multiple disciplines explored the effects of technology on social change by generating numerous case studies and several prototypes. Guest Lecturers from India were organized to speak to the students; these included individuals from various organizations, from the World Bank to Microsoft Research.
Jun 2007

How does the design of an architectural space affect social dynamics? Can art stimulate social engagement and social movement? In this project-oriented Action Research course, 20 students worked collaboratively to plan, produce and document architectural interventions designed to induce observable social change. This production-seminar was grounded in a literature drawing from art, architecture, cognitive science, sociology, and urban planning. This CAT 124 course was the recipient of a $5000 Open Classroom Challenge Grant from the UCIRA.
Jun 2007

From the mechanically regular grids of UCSD’s Eucalyptus trees, a soft translucent structure spirals into an set of 25 rooms and passageways. The material construction of the Labyrinth enables it to act as a student-operated gallery, performance theater, and informal social space.
Jun 2007

Anti-Normalizer is a location-based mobile phone scavenger hunt for weird and deviant behavior. The game was created as a mechanism for stimulating social change by presenting alternative models for public social interaction. These non-normative behaviors were intended to dispell common expectations for the range of ‘appropriate’ social activities.
May 2007

The Mobile Camera Tower is an inexpensive, quickly assembled mechanism for recording aerial footage of public spaces. The 40′ high portable tower assists the documentation and analysis of the structure of movement within architectural spaces. Featured at eTech 2007 and Maker Faire 2007.
Apr 2007

Exploring role of empathy in information visualization, putting eeg of myspace use next to time-synched view of myspace activity and facial expressions during recording. Played side-by-side, showing how much more we know about what is going on inside a person’s head by looking at their face and their activity versus their EEG.
Apr 2007

This is a MAX-MSP video technique for showing a time accelerated view of the recent past, so a participant can see themselves in the context of continually changing social structures. The camera records 10 minutes, then plays the footage back in just 1 minute. Then it continues, rolling forward in time, always showing a crowd’s movements at 10x speed.
Mar 2007

Biomemetics is an interactive animated visualization of the exchange of media and the structure of popularity within the largest online social network, Myspace.com. This interactive visualization supports large-scale social research by enabling online ethnographers to visually identify social structures and observe the distribution of media. Artistically, Biomemetics seeks to represent large-scale online social activity as a biological process, generating an abstracted portrayal of the human social “super-organism”.
Aug 2006

Comparative Graffiti Study, San Jose is an urban architectural intervention that enabled a controlled study of the production of graffiti across four neighborhoods in central San Jose.
Jun 2006

A highly rigorous analysis of the construction of social networks and the patterns of attentional flow within naturalistic party environments.
Apr 2006

Using an 8 foot diameter red weather balloon, crowd structures at San Diego immigration rallies were analyzed and aestheticized.