Making with a Social Purpose

Abstract
The goal of my research is to develop interactive tools and techniques that address pressing global challenges--so-called 'wicked' problems--in areas such as environmental sustainability, accessibility, and education. Typically, this work involves inventing or reappropriating methods to sense phenomena about the physical world, designing new methods to interpret and characterize this data, then building and evaluating interactive software or hardware tools uniquely enabled by these approaches.In this talk, I will describe two major threads of research in accessibility and STEM learning. The first thread examines how to make the physical world more accessible for people with disabilities. For example, Project Sidewalk (http://projectsidewalk.io) combines crowdsourcing, computer vision, and machine learning to semi-automatically identify street-level accessibility problems using online map imagery. The second thread explores how wearables and e-textiles can be designed to promote and engage children in life-relevant, personally meaningful STEM learning experiences. In the MakerWear project, for example, we designed a novel construction toolkit that enables young children (ages 5-10) to design and build their own interactive e-textiles and augment meaningful experiences in their lives with computation (e.g., sports, dance). For both threads, I will discuss example projects, describe key contributions, and highlight future work.