Research Group Projects and Descriptions

We define Design Ecology as the study of malleable design that is aware of and can seamlessly react to changing environments. This new approach to design will enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment. Our relationship with information should be appropriately situated in both spatial and social contexts; thus, while traditional design methods focus on single products and users, we believe that looking at the interplay between multiple people and multiple devices will yield significant results. To this end, we create visual communication that incorporates new display and computational technologies, novel software techniques, and perceptual and cognitive issues.

Grapevine is a visualization system for file and versioning systems. A common visual metaphor for such systems is the "star field," where items are displayed in an abstract, outer-space-like environment; however, this suffers from being difficult to read as well as unfamiliar. Most people have a limited fluency with the visual vocabulary of astronomic objects. Grapevine uses a "garden" metaphor to display a greater variety of relevant data in a way that is visually playful. For example, files/folders are represented by greener "leaves," which slowly turn red, like autumn foliage. Deleted files drop off and fall to the ground. By this means, the code repository can be used as an animated timeline of the development of a project.

This project uses gaze detection and eye tracking to create information displays that know when they are being read. By modeling reading behavior in real time, we can create information that continuously reacts to and is informed by the previous actions of the reader. In the future, we hope to expand this application to address multiple simultaneous readers gazing at multiple displays.

In most applications using digital typography today (e.g., animation or screen display), designers rely on existing typefaces. The possibilities for altering and transforming these typefaces are exploited in many ways. What is currently not explored is another large field of typography: the dynamic, flexible, and organic appearance of handwritten typography or calligraphy. This kind of typography is only brought into the digital realm by laborious processes such as scanning; this is because current file formats for type describe the outlines of the individual letters, not the essence/skeleton/model of a letter that we use when writing by hand. This project tries to explore the possibilities of computational and generative processes to improve and change the visual appearance of typography.

Using a distributed sensor network and Sociometric Badges from the Human Dynamics Group, we capture real-time social activity in physical space. By visualizing these data, the Design Ecology group hopes to enable people to easily locate areas of high activity and conversational interaction.

In the future, we will be able to paint pixels onto nearly any surface—but what will we use them for? Our smart megapixel display project aims to create a 100 megapixel display surface that is aware of the people around it and where they are looking. We will use this platform to explore collaborative work, software visualization, adaptive information display, and multi-resolution display.