Abstracts:

Jordan Hill: Designing a Contextualized Educational Tool for Multi-Pollutant Air Quality Data

This project follows a human-centered design process and involves research, design, prototyping, testing, and iteration of data visualizations as well as an interactive system that serves as a contextualized educational resource for multi-pollutant air quality data. The Air Quality Index (AQI) reports air pollution data as a single normalized value. Most public AQI sources either present this value without sufficient supports for deeper exploration of multiple pollutants or are robust data repositories that are too technical to be accessible to non-scientific audiences. My findings indicate many people have little context for understanding how the AQI is generated or what it measures. To combat this knowledge gap, I have created a contextualized, visualization-based platform to support public audiences in exploring air pollution beyond the AQI by displaying contextualized multi-pollutant data.

Matt Golino: Meditation in VR: From Master's Project to Startup

I will talk about the journey of taking my MS-HCI master's project from idea, to research project, to implementation, to longitudinal study, to startup! I'll talk about my experience with the CreateX accelerator and the ATDC incubator, the differences between building something for academia vs for market, and some of the challenges and victories along the journey thus far!

Nandita Gupta: The Shakti Collective: Storytelling Collective Showcasing People Who Work Within the Field of Digital Accessibility

User experience (UX) professionals play a crucial role in the accessibility and inclusive design of digital products as they are responsible for ensuring that a user has the best possible experience with their products. Despite this necessary responsibility, UX and related professionals report multiple difficulties in applying accessibility in their work and that was the focus of this project. Based on the exploratory research, we identified barriers within resources and created a storytelling collective that featured people in varied roles within digital accessibility. The Shakti Collective not only motivated other UX professionals to continue working within the accessibility field but also aimed to create a pipeline to introduce other UX professionals to accessibility and inclusive design processes.

Speaker Bios:

Jordan Hill graduated from the MS-HCI program in Fall 2020. At GT, she was a member of the OrCHID (Organic Computer-Human Interaction with Data) Lab and worked as a Head TA for Dr. Gregory Abowd's undergraduate Human-Computer Interaction course. She has experience in industry designing responsive websites, platforms, and web applications. Her interests lie in data visualization design, interaction design, and product strategy.

Matt Golino graduated from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering in 2016 and after a few years learning the ins and outs of frontend web development at General Motors, Tech called me back. He spent the last two years earning my Master's Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, honing skills, focusing in the fields of User Experience Design and Research, and getting real world experience with an internship on Google's YoutubeVR team.

Since graduating in Spring 2020, Matt has taken his master's project, a virtual reality meditation classroom, and transformed it into a startup: ZenVR! In the startup he plays the role of developer, designer, researcher, CEO, and so much more for this budding company and is learning something new every day. "With the help of the CreateX accelerator, we've taken our first leaps off the ground. ZenVR is currently available in its beta format on the SideQuest store, and we aim to launch on all major platforms this Spring!"

Nandita Gupta is a recent graduate from the MS-HCI program, an incoming Program Manager at Microsoft and an accessibility and inclusive design advocate. She has a background in Electrical Engineering and she launched Georgia-Pacific’s first mentoring program for entry-level engineers, and for this, she was named Influential Women of Manufacturing 2019 by Putman Media. In 2020, she was named Google Lime Scholar 2020 by Google for exemplifying leadership and demonstrated passion for computer science, inclusion, and technology. She has spoken at various conferences and events such as TEDx, Grace Hopper Celebration, World Information Architecture Day 2020 and will be sharing her work at Tapia and HCII in 2021.

Watch via BlueJeans Event: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/kaczufzw

Schedule of Brown Bag Speakers Spring 2021