www.theFirstTimeProject.com
For our Master's final project at the School of Information Mariano Ferrario Jeffrey Kalvass and I produced a web site allowing people to author and share stories of first time experiences. Any community member can define a new experience topic and, once created, any member can add their story to it. We promote the discovery of commonalities between stories from different topic areas by grouping stories based on shared narrative elements, namely: characters, emotional tenor, and theme. The site won the James Chen award for most outstanding final project in the Social Information Systems category. A feed of featured stories from the site is below.




For my Computer Mediated Communications course, Ross Housewright and I prototyped a system that would allow people to get feedback as to which sorts of personality traits come across in personal photographs. Increasingly, people put photos of themselves on social networking and dating systems such as Facebook, MySpace, and Match.com. In doing so they seek to convey aspects of their personality to peers and potential romantic partners. We were curious to see if people are able to anticipate how their images are perceived by others. Our system was designed to allow for such feedback, a sort of testing ground before committing images to sites tied to persistent personal identities.
Our final paper can be found here (pdf).
Our presentation slides can be found here (pdf).
Our paper prototype can be found here (pdf).

For our Information Visualization course, Mariano Ferrario and I designed and prototyped a system that visualizes patterns of language use in political discourse. Using the text from White House press briefings, we chunked the corpus into noun phrases and then visualized the frequency of phrase use over time. Additionally, we allowed users to annotate and share patterns they find in the data. By doing so we hoped people would collaborate in discovery and discussion of trends. A full description of the project can be found here.

For my Rapid Prototyping course, I worked with Chris Baker, Stefanie Robinson and Jennifer Mangold to design and build a fully functioning "smart" baby monitor. The monitor was designed to detect if a baby rolls onto its stomach during sleep (parents are advised to place their infants to sleep on their backs so as to decrease the likelihood of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Using Intel's MOTE technology, our design augments traditional baby monitor's with accelerometer data collected from a sensor embedded in the child's clothing.
The class ended with a trade show; its web site can be found here.

In the fall of 2005 I drafted a new information architecture scheme and designed user-interface wireframes for Yahoo! Research's new web site. The site was designed to allow users to navigate to content across various facets: people, projects, locations, publications and events. The system would automatically populate and cross-link pages with related assets.

www.sfai.edu
In the fall of 2004 I worked with Brian Hinch from Tellart to redesign the San Francisco Art Institute's web site. I produced the project, conducted a needs assessment and drafted the information architecture for the site. Brian created wireframes and visual designs for the user interface.

Between 2000 and 2004 I oversaw the interactive media projects at Jan Krukowski & Company, a New York City agency focusing on the education and not-for-profit sectors. During this time we completed over 20 projects, including the web sites for Bowdoin College, Hampshire College, The University of Vermont, Beloit College, and Wheaton College. Working in partnership with Tellart, an information and interface design firm in Providence, Rhode Island, I helped develop innovative ways to tell immersive non-fiction stories on the Web.
To view the original, award winning, design for Wheaton College click here.
Please note: the above web sites have changed quite a bit from our original designs.