Research Statement
How can we enrich human experience and augment human abilities by enabling people to create and shape their own user experiences?
My work explores and researches the futuristic implications of a computationally driven individual-centered adaptable and adaptive world.
In particular I'm interested in user generated malleable objects, spaces and software artifacts. Where everyone is able to pull, twist, and reshape objects to their individual needs and wishes. Ideally without requiring expert knowledge or skills.
Objects can be as simple as bean bags that remember your shape, or kitchen forks whose length and weight distribution can be easily altered by pulling on each end of the fork. Objects can be manifested as thought experiments, physical objects, virtual objects or any mixture of bits and atoms with a dose of digital smarts.
In a world where everything is malleable human physiological differences constrain the design space from which self-designing and user designed objects can emerge. For example clothes aren't designed for people with three arms because designers implicitly model standard human physiology.
As part of my PhD I developed methods for measuring design effectiveness and enabling design adaptions based on individual physiological differences. Particularly focused on individual psychophysical differences in low-level vision.
With the techniques I developed, predictions can be made about how easy or hard a visual design or information visualisation is to see. Then the predictions can be used to automatically improve the display of complex visualisations and designs to suit individual differences in eye function.
