Lisa Mercer

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · School of Art and Design, College of Fine and Applied Arts

Numerous interventions have been designed to build empathy, not only to learn how to empathize, but also to motivate people to understand. The focus of this research is to support both makers and users in enhancing empathy building through long-term engagement in co-creation. This study is mainly concentrated on proposing the Role-playing Living La...

Role-playing Living Lab method is maker and user-driven co-creation approach to involve and support both makers and users in enhancing empathy building through long-term engagement. This method is especially concentrated on the maker's experience (of user's) through maker participation in user-generated content which supports the real user in creat...

Operation Compass is an ongoing ethnographic research study, and this paper is focused on phase two: integrating a social impact framework into the foundation of Operation Compass to develop design interventions for the complex social justice issue of human trafficking. In order to develop the parameters of a foundational framework, we need to (1)...

The digital humanities (DH) has a long and successful history of creating, using, and maintaining DH centres, as evidenced by the vast centerNet network. Furthermore, some of the most successful centres are constantly evolving in form and function. In this paper, we propose that the next phase in the evolution of the DH centre may involve a related...

The ethnographic research study titled Operation Compass is focused on the development of design-led interventions to combat human trafficking. Phase one was focused on the question, how could a modified form of technology enable truck drivers to report suspected instances of human trafficking at a higher rate? The collection of primary research wa...