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Publications (92)
The SEAD Steering Committee gathered a collection of “exemplar” works demonstrating effective intersections among the sciences and engineering with art, design, and the humanities. More than 100 exemplars from were submitted by 21 nominators during a 6-month
call for nominations. The exemplars were analyzed according to disciplines, demographics,...
Abstract: We present design principles and prototypical instantiations of a series of game-like learning environments. The “Magix” series supports learning through playful exploration. Extending the engaging nature of constructionist-style tools, Magix play kits foster a constructive-dialogic style of interaction. In the course of creating colorful...
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In 2012, The Network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design (SEAD) launched a White Papers initiative to build community awareness of perceived challenges and opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration across the breadth of science, engineering, art, design and...
Innovations emerging from the intersection of the sciences, engineering, arts and design are
transforming our economy, culture, and learning contexts. This transformation is emerging
through development of products, methods, and questions that are fundamentally hybrid, such as
software developed for human play, hardware designed for aesthetic elega...
Innovations emerging from the intersection of the sciences, engineering, arts and design are transforming our economy, culture, and learning contexts. This transformation is emerging through development of products, methods, and questions that are fundamentally hybrid, such as software developed for human play, hardware designed for aesthetic elega...
Wood, A., Davenport, G., Donovan, B., and Strohecker, C. 2004. Stories for remote place: Content, structure, device, trials. Proceedings of International Cultural Heritage Informatics. Abstract (EN) Multimedia story, when invested with mobile sensing technology, is a powerful medium for enhancing the experience of a place. We introduce a mobile com...
The cutting edge of designing for the user experience today is found in the arena of designing for the user’s cultural context
{1}, {2}, {3}. This is primarily true because of global expansion of the Internet and Web usage. Brick and mortar businesses
have learned to adapt their products to be culturally sensitive. For example, car manufacturers bu...
Empowering Minds (EM) is a project that has deeply integrated technologically expressive materials, including robotics and
presentation and programming software, into the educational practices of teachers at more than a dozen primary schools across
Ireland. Here, we present Empowering Minds as a model of constructionist learning and teacher profess...
Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986. MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH Bibliography: leaves 52-59. by Carol Strohecker. M.S.V.S.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1991. Includes bibliographical references (p. 535-551). Carol Strohecker. Ph.D.
We are developing a digital writing tool, Polymorphic Letters (PL), to investigate hand and pen movements as they may extend and enrich expression in written language. PL recognizes individual letters and associated spatial, temporal and pressure qualities of pen movements. The system maps these features to typography and colour variables, creating...
During recent decades, miniaturisation and affordability of silicon chips have led to pervasiveness of devices for computation and communication. Now sensing technologies are becoming smaller and cheaper, and therefore more widely available to augment capabilities of mobile computational devices. These capabilities pose new challenges in designing...
He contained Dublin… If Dublin were destroyed, his words could rebuild the houses; if its population were wiped out, his books could repeople it. Joyce was many things, but he was certainly the last forty volumes of Thom's Directory thinking aloud." [8, p.15] "Different trains of thought constantly intercut one another (as they do in real life), of...
We argue that civic discourse can also be public storytelling and propose three reasons to consider this relationship: stories' relational nature - their ability to represent uniquely human perspectives and emotions - may ameliorate aspects of citizens' disinterest in civic life; the ability of stories to represent both individual perspectives and...
The use of the computer as a model, metaphor, and modelling tool has tended to privilege the 'cognitive' over the 'affective' by engendering theories in which thinking and learning are viewed as information processing and affect is ignored or marginalised. In the last decade there has been an accelerated flow of findings in multiple disciplines sup...
Media Lab Europe's Everyday Learning group and initiatives associated with the Empowering Minds project are developing new strategies for broad access to technologies and appropriation of the ideas they engender. Here we include examples of sensor-equipped portable devices for registering environmental conditions, a form and forum for developing pu...
We present an approach and a tool for helping individuals express small story-like expressions of personal perspectives in the context of larger, collage-like incubators of public opinions. Our goal is to work with people to create technologically supported public discourse spheres in which they can both represent personal views and practise new wa...
Objective: This study tested the feasibility and safety of a computer-based application designed to facilitate the healthy coping of children and their families who must contend with significant congenital heart disease (CHD). The application, called the Experience Journal (EJ), is a psychoeducational intervention based upon a narrative model invol...
The Everyday Learning group at Media Lab Europe invent tools and environments with and in which people can experiment with ideas, create things using computational materials, and make their creations public. We are interested in how these processes support people's learning through life – meaning through the lifetime and through day-to-day living,...
We present an approach and a tool for helping individuals express small story-like expressions of personal perspectives in the context of larger, collage-like incubators of public opinions. Our goal is to work with people to create technologically supported public discourse spheres in which they can both represent personal views and practise new wa...
We are interested in how individuals and communities develop opinions as they design and use new mobile, public-sphere technologies. We situate our work among new considerations of ethnography, mobile technologies and rhetoric and describe the design and pilot installation of a new technology called TexTales designed to support mobile public discou...
We are interested in how individuals and communities develop opinions as they design and use new mobile, public-sphere technologies. We situate our work among new considerations of ethnography, mobile technologies and rhetoric and describe the design and pilot installation of a new technology called TexTales designed to support mobile public discou...
In the last three years, a number of Irish primary schools have been using LEGO Mindstorms technology in order to investigate the use of project-based learning as an alternative teaching tool. This has involved the use of LEGO bricks combined with standard electronic motors and some commercial sensors (e.g. temperature). In order to develop this pr...
We describe an approach for supporting open and sustained public dialogue called Citizen Journalism. In this model, non-journalists, technology designers and professional journalists collaborate to design new technologies, learning relationships and broadcast channels for individual and community expression. We present the results of 2 weeklong wor...
We describe an approach for supporting open and sustained public dialogue called Citizen Journalism. In this model, non-journalists, technology designers and professional journalists collaborate to design new technologies, learning relationships and broadcast channels for individual and community expression. We present the results of 2 week-long wo...
Nature Trailer is an entertainment and navigation platform that attempts to facilitate recreational exploration. Designed for a hiker wandering through a remote place, Nature Trailer virtually embeds context-aware stories throughout a landscape and provides clues of their locations. In this scenario a user is mobile, on foot, outdoors, and with lit...
Narrative Intelligence (NI) — the confluence of narrative, Artificial Intelligence, and media studies — studies, models, and supports the human use of narrative to understand the world. This volume brings together established work and founding documents in Narrative Intelligence to form a common reference point for NI researchers, providing perspec...
This paper presents a prototype learning environment for children to create their own knowledge about multivariate systems. We developed a virtual world linked to a tabletop-sized physical dome in which children experiment with envirojnmental parameters affecting plant growth. A key concern of the design was giving children control of the temporal...
We present an approach to investigating the development of "dilemmatic thinking" in individuals and communities. To study this style of thinking we use a framework called Situated Citizen Journalism (SCJ) in which non-specialists ("citizens") work with professional photojournalists and learning technologists to create and critique images. The parti...
We present an approach to investigating the development of "dilemmatic thinking" in individuals and communities. To study this style of thinking we use a framework called Situated Citizen Journalism (SCJ) in which non-specialists ("citizens") work with professional photojournalists and learning technologists to create and critique images. The parti...
This paper describes premises of a video about an as-yet unimplemented design for a virtual environment. The video is a basis for discussion -- a sketch, rather than a specification, of a virtual playspace and interactions that can happen there. The playspace is conceived as a "learning environment" in which activities can focus thinking on certain...
Studying people's thinking, particularly when both "cognitive" and "affective" aspects are of interest, requires a setting conducive to in-depth exploration of the participants' dialogue and actions. This need has implications for the duration of the study and for the nature of the environment in which the inquiry is conducted. The researcher must...
was supported by working with knots. In particular, comparisons of similar knots became a useful way for people to see the elements of the configurations and come to understand relationships among the parts. This research is within the domain of mathematical thinking and is specifically concerned with how people develop understandings of the relati...
This paper describes a possible set of software learning activities called "microworlds." The microworlds could be stand-alone "construction kits" for single users or teams of users, or located as pockets of activity within a networked multiuser environment. The design of the microworlds is such that exchanges of objects between the microworlds and...
WayMaker" is a tool enabling non-professionals to create digital layouts for large-scale graphical virtual environments. The design tool is based on "elements of the city image" as described by the urban planner, Kevin Lynch (1960). Ultimately, WayMaker should be situated within a virtual environment so that output from the tool is transformed as e...
This paper describes exploration of uses of a computational storytelling environment on the Cardiology Unit of the Childrens Hospital in Boston, during the summer of 1997. Young cardiac patients ranging from age 7 to 16 used the SAGE environment to tell personal stories and create interactive characters, as a way of coping with cardiac illness, hos...
This short paper presents continued work on a design tool presented at CHI '97 [7] and further described in WP99-01 and [8, 9]. WayMaker is a tool for mapping the layouts and structural features of graphical virtual environments. The tool is based on principles of mental mapping familiar to urban designers and planners. Here we describe usage sessi...
An abundant amount of information is created and delivered over electronic media. Users risk becoming overwhelmed by the flow of information, and they lack adequate tools to help them manage the situation. Information filtering (IF) is one of the methods ...
Nearly forty years ago, Kevin Lynch (1960) described the environmental image in terms of five structural features: districts, edges, paths, nodes, and landmarks. Though the work has been much criticized, even by Lynch himself, it may provide a basis for a computational tool useful both in design and in research on spatial cognition. This paper revi...
We describe a genre of game-like construction kits and an extensible Java framework that models method and structures for generating them. We include descriptions of the kits' conceptual bases and design principles, and explain how work with users of the "Kit for Kits" framework informed modifications promoting use by people with a broad range of e...
PatternMagix is a game-like software construction kit. Its constructive-dialogic style of interaction supports learning through playful exploration. In the course of creating colorful tiles and patterns, learners explore geometric operations, like rotation and symmetry. Their moves alternate with automatic moves of the computational device so that...
We compare six definitions of the concept of "representative user," including interpretations based in statistics, grounded theory, political theory and design practice. This participatory poster invites conference participants to contribute their own interpretations.
Zyklodeon is a software construction kit in which Players create colorful Dancers and set them into motion. Dancers' appearances are inspired by Picasso's post-Cubist works, and movements are inspired by Martha Graham's emphasis on the torso as life center. The figures breathe visibly and move gracefully as they encounter other Dancers. Zyklodeon P...
We bring together concerns in software design and learning theory through creation of a Java framework for development of software construction kits. The kits are highly visual and highly interactive, and are premised on the notion of "microworlds" as environments for learning and learning research [6]. Usage of four existing kits is informing deve...
To test the feasibility and safety of a computer-based application designed to facilitate the healthy coping of children and their families who must contend with significant congenital heart disease (CHD). The application, called the Experience Journal (EJ), is a psychoeducational intervention based on a narrative model involving the sharing of per...
We have developed a genre of software construction kits and a framework for developing them, which is both conceptual and structural. The kits are highly graphical and highly interactive. They are characterized by two main processes: players' building of objects from graphical elements, and the software's activation of the constructions. The existi...
This paper describes exploration of uses of a computational storytelling environment on the Cardiology Unit of the Children's Hospital in Boston during the summer of 1997. Young cardiac patients ranging from age 7 to 16 used the SAGE environment to tell personal stories and create interactive characters, as a way of coping with cardiac illness, hos...
We describe a tool enabling non-professionals to create digital layouts for large-scale graphical virtual environments. The design tool is based on "elements of the city image" as described by the urban planner, Kevin Lynch (1960). These elements serve as both organizational principle and navigational aid. Further work is needed to situate the tool...
We have developed a genre of software construction kits
characterized by two main processes: players' building of objects from
graphical elements, and the software's activation of the constructions.
Five kits demonstrate a range of techniques for constructing objects.
Different approaches to construction may address different thinking and
learning...
This paper posits the usefulness of mental shifts of scale and perspective in thinking and communicating about spatial relations, and describes two experimental techniques for researching such cognitive activities. The first example involves mentally expanding a hand-sized piece of entangled string, a knot, so that following a portion of the string...
We describe a genre of game-like construction kits and an extensible Java framework that models method and structures for generating them. We include descriptions of the kits' conceptual bases and design principles, and explain how work with users of the "Kit for Kits" framework informed modifications promoting use by people with a broad range of e...
This is a preliminary design document for narrative systems in which multiple users interact in a manner reminiscent of the chorus in ancient Greek theater. The work extends premises originally described in Working Notes of the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Interactive Story Systems (held at Stanford University), and represented in a prototype for...
Two software applications illustrate principles of microworld
design. WayMaker is a tool for constructing maps and virtual scenes of
cityscapes. With DemBones, users build cartoon-like skeletons from
images of dinosaur bones, and experiment with simulated legged
locomotion in animating the creatures. Each kit is both a learning
environment and a to...
This paper describes premises of a video about an as-yet unimplemented design for a virtual environment. The video is a basis for discussion -- a sketch, rather than a specification, of a virtual playspace and interactions that can happen there. The playspace is conceived as a "learning environment" in which activities can focus thinking on certain...
We present design principles and prototypical instantiations of aseries of game-like learning environments. The "Magix" seriessupports learning through playful exploration. Extending theengaging nature of constructionist-style tools, Magix play kitsfoster a constructive-dialogic style of interaction. In the course ofcreating colorful, animated obje...
We present design principles and prototypical instantiations of a series of game-like learning environments. The "Magix " series supports learning through playful exploration. Extending the engaging nature of constructionist-style tools, Magix play kits foster a constructivedialogic style of interaction. In the course of creating colorful, animated...
Medical advances make it increasingly possible for children with previously fatal illness to live and thrive. However, a significant number still experience repeated operations, hospitalization, and invasive procedures, or need special care at home. Many do so with little or no intervention to help them and their families cope with the emotional st...
This is a design document for a second entry in the Magix series of playful learning environments. In AnimMagix, childrencreate whimsical creatures with anthropomorphic behaviors and launch them onto a field in which the creatures interact andaffect one anothers' behaviors. The creatures become like a dancers on an ice rink. Their movements and int...
This paper describes premises of a video, Zircus, presenting a design for a virtual environment. The video is a basis for discussion - a sketch, rather than a specification, of a virtual playspace and interactions that can happen there. The playspace is conceived as a learning environment in which constructive activities can focus thinking on certa...
The paper describes lessons learned about the design of a form for interactive narrative. The lessons are based on an initial prototype and have ramifications for both a next-step implementation and for broader understanding of the form. Key lessons pertain to pacing, narrative structure, giving feedback through the interface, and contexts for use.
With the "WayMaker" software construction kit, users can design layouts for virtual spaces. These layouts are arrangments of structural elements described by Kevin Lynch in his book, The Image of the City. WayMaker tranforms arrangements of districts, paths, edges, nodes, and landmarks into street scenes. The initial prototype fits roofs, facades,...
This paper examines an example of learning with artifacts using the commonplace materials of string and knots. Emphases include
research into learning processes as well as construction of objects to assist learning. The inquiry concerns the development
of mathematical thinking, topology in particular. The research methodology combines participant o...
Studying people's thinking, particularly when both "cognitive" and "affective" aspects are of interest, requires a setting conducive to in-depth exploration of the participants' dialogue and actions. This need has implications for the duration of the study and for the nature of the environment in which the inquiry is conducted. The researcher must...
Museums typically strive to support learning about topics that pertain to the collections. However, necessities in museum-exhibit design may work against this goal. Designing for experiences of just a few minutes keeps traffic moving through gallery spaces, but prevents the immersion that a productive learning experience demands. This paper describ...
The authors have implemented a prototype computer system that combines aspects of an on-line community with those of a virtual reality environment. They believe that interactive multimedia environments, and virtual reality environments in particular, can provide an immersive quality that lets users explore many new learning experiences. The prototy...
We present a case study analysis of teacher empowerment and student learning through Constructionist engagement with computational technologies and learning about learning itself. Looking beyond how a teacher overcomes hesitations about new technologies, we consider how he redefines his own understandings of learning as he begins to use computation...
We have developed a genre of software construction kits characterized by two main processes: players' building of objects from graphical elements, and the software's activation of the constructions. Five kits demonstrate a range of techniques for constructing objects. Different approaches to construction may address different thinking and learning...
This paper addresses new categories of possibility that emerge as we consider certain societal needs, trends, and directions in concert with the development of immersive learning environments. It describes ways in which synergies between networked graphics and simulated dynamics, epistemology and psychological development, and studies of human and...
We offer an interaction design pattern for selecting instantiations of a given device, and suggest additional points for discussion at the CHI'2000 workshop on interaction design patterns. We emphasize the need for thoughtful documentation of the purpose of design patterns, and the importance of applying them in a participatory design framework. We...
If you want to learn a foreign language, go to the country in which the language is spoken and live there for a while. That way you'll hear the language constantly, will be inclined to use it, and will do so within a cultural context in which the language has been developing for years and years. While many might agree with such common-sense wisdom,...
This paper explores how design and cultural critique collide when working with a community to conceive and construct an emergent archive in which imagination, image and text also "kaleide" to support the development of new kinds of intermodal literacies. We situate our investigation as a collaboration between a media researcher and a historian work...
Nearly forty years ago, Kevin Lynch (1960) described the environmental image in terms of five structural features: districts, edges, paths, nodes, and landmarks. Though the work has been much criticized, even by Lynch himself, it may provide a basis for a computational tool useful both in design and in research on spatial cognition. This paper revi...
This paper describes how the device of the chorus was used in plays from ancient Greece and posits ways in which these uses may translate as bases for interactions with computer-based stories. In ancient Greek theater, the chorus mediated between the audience and the action. Now, chorus members can be seen as agents who are not directly part of the...
This paper describes an experiment with the theatrical device of the Greek chorus, which serves as a model for user interactions with a computer-based narrative. By interacting with the story, users can learn more and more about the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Much of the information is supplied by chorus members who comment on the ac...
This paper describes usage trials for the initial implementation of the WayMaker prototype. Six students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design participated. Findings from the trials are influencing development of the second version of the prototype.
This paper describes "Tired of Giving In," a prototype computer-based narrative. TOGI is an experiment with the theatrical device of the Greek chorus, which serves as a model for user interactions. By interacting with the story, viewers can learn more and more about the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a key event in the American Civil Rig...
1 Abstract This thesis proposes an approach and an interface, that allow children to
In the Magix series of software learning environments, children can learn about topics in math and science through playful exploration. They experiment with patterns and dynamic systems through a constructive-dialogic style of interaction. In these colorful environments, children make and transform virtual objects and then study effects that emerge...
We present design principles and prototypical instantiations of a series of game-like learning environments. Thë Magixeries supports learning through playful exploration. Extending the engaging nature of constructionist-style tools, Magix play kits foster a constructive-dialogic style of interaction. In the course of creating colorful, animated obj...