Come early ahead of the seminar for a preview of juried projects heading to the ACCelerate Creativity and Innovation Festival taking place Oct. 13-15, 2017, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Oct. 5 ACCelerate Project: Rib Cage
RIB CAGE is an electro-acoustic instrument that incorporates elements of robotics. This instrument is designed to explore the relationship between human and robot co-performing in a single instrument.

Seminar Abstracts:

Mariam Asad
PhD Student, Digital Media
Prefigurative Design: Exploring An Alternate Model for Civic Engagement
This talk discusses a design research orientation called prefigurative design, which I frame as useful for design work around political or civic aims. In prefigurative design, design work does not only articulate or represent certain goals as design objects, but also structures design processes to do the work of actualizing those same goals. Prefigurative design is an opportunity for us to better incorporate goals of justice and equity into our work. This talk will discuss what prefigurative design looks like in HCI research and how we can use prefigurative design to explore and experiment with civic interactions.

Maia Jacobs
PhD Student, Human Centered Computing
Designing Personalized and Adaptive Support for Cancer Patients
When managing cancer, people encounter many physical, emotional, social, and logistical challenges that impede on their quality of life and their ability to effectively manage their health. Helping people overcome these barriers is challenging, as the issues they face are not only broad, but also dynamic, changing over time. Timely access to health information can significantly improve a person’s illness management and quality of life, but often people feel under-informed or unable to find the necessary information. In this talk I present MyPath, an application that connects breast cancer patients to personalized, adaptive, and trusted health information. I also discuss results from the MyPath field study, which demonstrate how personalized health information can encourage active engagement in one's health management.

Clint Zeagler
PhD Student, Human Centered Computing
Bridging the Gap: Aiding Designers in Creating Wearable Technology
Although much of my work and my dissertation focuses on usability aspects of wearable technology dealing with human factors. I will be presenting on recent work that makes the technology side of wearable technology easier to incorporate in the process of designers. I will also illuminate a case studies with artists that showcase using these efforts to make wearable technology design accessible to a wider array of disciplines. I will highlight new tools available from my research such at the Wearable Technology Body Maps that include design and accessibility considerations for on-body location of devices and technology.

Speaker Bios:

Mariam Asad is a PhD student in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech. Her work focuses on activism, design, and social justice. She is interested in the different ways that different Atlanta communities discuss, use, and appropriate technologies to do political work. She explores how technology design can offer opportunities for civic participation through both policy- and grassroots/community-based initiatives.

Maia Jacobs is completing her PhD in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Tech, advised by Elizabeth Mynatt. Jacobs’ research contributes to the fields of ubiquitous computing and personal health informatics through the development and assessment of novel approaches for mobile health tools to support chronic disease management. Her evaluations of these systems provide scientific evidence that interactions with personal health tools positively influence healthcare experiences and impact health outcomes. Jacobs’ research has gained national attention, having recently been recognized in the 2016 report to the President of the United States from the President's Cancer Panel, which focuses on improving cancer-related outcomes.

Clint Zeagler is a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing and is advised by Melody Jackson. Zeagler is also a Research Scientist II for the Interactive Media Technology Center and Program Manager of the Wearable Computing Center. He is a designer and researcher of wearable technology and interested in how to create wearable technology that is both usable and useful. Making wearable technology usable involves empirical usability studies to show how a person might interact with technology on the body. Zeagler’s previous work in textile based on-body interfaces is an example of the types of usability studies he has overseen. “Is it Gropable” was one such study about how well a person could interact with capacitive sensitive raised embroidered interfaces without visual attention. Other usability and technical material studies followed developing new textile interactions and testing the limitations of manufacturing materials and process. Making wearable technology useful involves working with designers and giving them tools they can use to create wearable technology. Some of these tools are outlined in his paper on the “Electronic Textile Interface Swatch Book” and his recent paper “Where to Wear It” about a collection of guidelines and Body Maps to aid designers in choices about on-body location of technology.