JUNE 2019
VIVID SYDNEY: REMEMBERING RELATIONSHIPS DISCUSSION PANEL
I was fortunate enough to be part of a panel discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Vivid Sydney, an annual festival of light, music and ideas and the largest event in Australia. Alongside Prof. Elise van den Hoven and neuropsychologist Dr. Laurie Miller, we discussed ways in which objects and digital media are shaping our relationships and memories.
JANUARY 2019
INDIGENOUS OUTREACH PROGRAM: GALUWA DESIGN WORKSHOP
Each year UTS invites indigenous high school students from across Australia to attend a week long workshop to discover the possibilities of a career in design. For the past two years I’ve had the pleasure of running the Product Design workshop, guiding students through a series of hands-on activities including coming up with their own design to build and showcase at the end of the week.
A student’s design for a wall-mounted key rack adopting a traditional dot painting style.
MARCH - JULY 2018
CSIRO ON PRIME: PRE-ACCELERATOR PROGRAM FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IDEAS
ON Prime is a pre-accelerator run by the CSIRO that helps research teams validate their research and discover a real world application for it. Our Affie research team was fortunate enough to be accepted into the program to work closely with experienced facilitators from the mentor network to test paths for our IP and go through a process of customer discovery and market validation. See the video below for a summary of our product offering.
Affie: An emotive thesaurus that allows users to search for concepts with emotional (rather than literal) similarity.
DECEMBER 2016
OZCHI CONFERENCE: TANGIBLE INTERACTION AND COGNITION WORKSHOP
As part of the Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI) held in Launceston, several of us from the Materialising Memories team ran a full day research workshop focusing on the overlap between tangible interaction and cognition. The workshop brought together an international group of designers, psychologists and programmers working in areas related to user interfaces and the cognitive load of various computer-related tasks to explore issues within the field and future directions. An overview of the workshop proceedings can be found here.
MARCH - JUNE 2016-19
EMOTIVE DINING: INTRODUCING STUDENTS TO EMOTIONAL DESIGN
As part of my involvement in teaching undergraduate design courses at UTS, I developed a 6-week project that introduces students to emotional design concepts through focusing on the emotions involved in social dining situations. Students were tasked with creating a dining product that promotes a chosen emotion within a particular setting (e.g. a relaxed family dinner, surprising picnic, delicate wedding or intimate first date).
Tangled - A cutlery set designed by Pearson Bulmer.
A design for a cutlery set to create an intimate first date dining setting. The two sets of cutlery begin intertwined, forcing guests to collaborative untangle their utensils for their meal. This playful act is intended to act as an icebreaker and promote physical intimacy by breaking the touch barrier.