MS-HCI Program | Recent Master’s Projects

Abstract

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.

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.