sidlamaute

[sidlamaute]

Embrace -- May 2020 to October 2020

Summary: I pitched a feature to the C-suite at Embr Labs to address loneliness with a shared remote thermal touch intervention in May 2020 (early in the pandemic). This was based on an idea from a university collaborator, Hans Rocha IJzerman at the University of Grenoble, and my additional research on the "Loneliness Epidemic", declared by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in 2018.

I researched the market and learned how to use lean canvases to make a business case when I noticed that Embr could leverage this unique opportunity to use thermal haptics to replicate touch between users. Once the C-suite approved, I was assigned my first major project management opportunity, and was mentored by the Chief Data Officer. I worked with a team of 5 doing everything from designing the thermal sensation to developing the app's UI. I personally became involved with the UX development process, in partnership with the company's UX designer.

As a result, I worked on a range of tasks, including user flow design, user acceptance testing, intellectual property research, and human subject study design. I researched IP so that the marketing team could get a trademark on my proposed feature name--Embrace--and so that the research team could evaluate the feasibility of a patent application. Meanwhile, I kept in mind that this was not just a feature; it was conceived as an intervention for feelings of isolation. In partnership with Professor IJzerman and the internal Senior Research Scientist, we created two 5-minute surveys for feature users based on psychological measures for connection. The objective was to measure the effectiveness of the intervention in making people feel more connected.

After just 5 months, collaborating remotely in unprecedented times, we launched the feature. We sent initial and 8-week surveys to people who used the feature, and found that 90% of users liked the feature, and the majority of those who filled out the pre-use and 8-week surveys felt an increased sense of connection with the primary person with whom they exchanged warmth.

What I Learned: Business case development, project management, intellectual property research, user acceptance testing, collaborative UI design, human subject study design

Documentation: customer release email

[sidlamaute]

Thermal Alarm/Scheduling Sessions -- July 2019 to Jan 2020

Summary: When I joined Embr Labs, I had ample latitude to pick my research topics, and I was and still am interested in technological interventions for mental maladies. I read numerous papers on temperature and depression, narrowed to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which then led to studying and prototyping a thermal alarm and scheduling thermal sessions to bring regular relief for when people know they need it most. This initially involved modifying the firmware (in C) on the wearable device to design a gradual awakening session. I then ran internal alpha tests for both technical and user experience reasons: 1. I had to check if the wearable experienced any time drift when programmed to start 8 hours after the session was set

2. I had to check if people actually woke up as a result of the thermal stimulus. The results showed that time drift was minimal, but my initial stimulation design was flawed. As it turns out, instead of having 12 minutes of getting colder and colder (the longest the device could handle without getting dangerously hot), having 30 minutes of "waves" of cooling from room temperature to a fixed colder temperature was much more effective. The company became interested in using my feature for more than just the population affected by SAD, given that other users might find that they need sessions at predictable times and thus would want to schedule them. Therefore, I moved on to phase two of this project, which involved designing features in the wearable's companion Android app to enable users to program thermal sessions for any time they wanted (as opposed to the fixed 8 hours I used for testing) and to schedule up to 10 sessions. To support multiple sessions, I also had to modify the firmware to support a table of timers with the parameters of each desired session. However, given that sessions could be scheduled up to 24 hours in advance, I decided not to rely on the lack of time drift I observed in the previous experiment. Instead, I designed a syncing system from the phone to the wearable that would check and correct the remaining time until the session started any time the app was opened. I then ran another alpha user experience study, checking if the interface and options were logical and sufficient for users, and if there were any time drift issues in the longer-term scale. I omitted the pictures of the session setup process because they're quite boring, but as you can see, there's room for a list of sessions, and each entry shows the relevant details of the session, which can also be edited or deleted. As a result of my supportive findings, this project was added to the roadmap. What I Learned: more complexities of C, the newer features of Android programming at the time, user study design, and key human thermal perception paradigms.

[sidlamaute]

The Persistence of Sport Death -- Spring 2024

Summary: Translating a mural into a dynamic, 3D representation was an amazing challenge to give myself. In coming back to the earliest craft I learned--sewing--I decided to push myself to come up with techniques I'd never tried before.

My community from MIT has a classic motto: "Sport Death: Only Life Can Kill You". The meaning amounts to something along the lines of "live life to the fullest" and/or "carpe diem" (even though as someone who studied Latin for a decade, it's important to note that the context of "carpe diem" in Horace's poem has a narrower focus and more lascivious intent than that which many people think in the modern day.) Here's what the default iconography looks like--"ONLY LIFE CAN KILL YOU" is spelled out in the teeth of the skull.

My friend made the mural in the heading picture, a variation of the default skull, in 2009. The brain actually consists of letters that spell out "SPORT DEATH 2HNC" (in which 2HNC is where she lived in the community's dorm). She told me it came to her in a dream, in which the colors of the letters were continually shifting and changing.

The way the folding of the skull could be captured by ruching fabric was what drew me toward making this a sewing project. My challenge was then to find fabrics that exhibited the closest to iridescence that I could find, so that when the light caught it at different angles, the colors would exhibit the same shifting and changing quality as she envisioned.

Between December 2023 and March 2024 I bought fabrics from 5 different shops in NYC, yielding 12 total to work with for the letters alone. (In this process, I once had to pull out my rusty French to try to communicate the idea of "iridescence" to a francophone shop assistant.)

I already had a physical print-out of the skull in my possession, so I traced its outline and experimented with what I wanted the skull to say--I never lived on 2HNC and wanted to make this a more broadly applicable piece. Here were some sketches:

(I replaced 2HNC here with "[heart] ROAST" in the first picture because I was preparing this for our annual reunion, called Steer Roast. Also, sorry for the quality of the second image.)

By the end of drafting, I decided to go with "SPORT DEATH 4EVER", then did some math to scale up the skull, and drew it on a clear sheet of plastic so that I could trace patterns later.

My initial planned technique for the letters was to have every part of each letter raised to look most like the folds of a brain and really feature the iridescent qualities of each fabric, like in this prototype "S":

However, because I was working with a lot of different fabrics, many less tightly woven and/or stiff, it was hard to sew many of them in a bent position. Also, since the "stripes" were achieved with often heterogeneous types of fabrics, the differing stiffnesses made it hard to constrain the letters to their intended shapes. And all of that is putting aside all the measurement required to achieve the fluid curves of each letter using this 3D technique. Due to my time constraints (I wanted to present this at the reunion from May 3-5, but started sewing on weekends in March, and had to hand sew every letter to use different thread colors for each), I decided to revisit my plan. Creating loops of one fabric atop another flat fabric still produced the intended effect while making construction much easier.

The letters came out pretty satisfyingly, and one can see the shift in color a bit from these 2 slightly different angles. (The following pictures were taken before doing the final trimming of loose strands.)

After the letters, the other 3D details were:

The stars, which I folded and hand-sewed to make them slightly raised rather than completely flush with the surface. Even though they were going to be scrunched up, I wanted them to pop.

The ooze. I wanted to make sure it actually hung over the eye rather than being sewn directly on top, and sewed on a backside to make it round, like how actual dripping paint would appear.

Ruching, which was a new technique for me, and it took some experimentation, but I was pretty satisfied with the high-level effect produced in the end.

Finally, to assemble everything on the 2XL shirt I bought so that I could show off this work all day at the reunion, I decided to sew down velcro and velcro the skull components and teeth onto the shirt rather than sew it all down directly so that:

I could adjust placement of all the parts on the fly

I would be able to machine wash the shirt, as many of the fabrics in the letters would likely disintegrate in the machine.

I bought some skeleton gloves to complete the effect (and save me sewing time to avoid reinventing the wheel), and voilà! The friend who made the initial mural was absolutely floored when she saw the final product, and I received a lot of love overall for my own labor of love. What I Learned: new sewing techniques (especially ruching), converting 2D art into 3D, and, I suppose, how to (barely) describe iridescent materials in French.

[sidlamaute]

A Brief History of Territorial Exchange -- May 2019

Summary: I took Interactive Data Visualization as part of a concentration in Human-Computer Interfaces. For the final project in the class, my team chose visualizing territorial exchanges around the world between 1815 and 2018. We combined multiple data display methods and interactive elements into one visualization, which allowed us to display the details of a rich dataset coherently and accessibly.

I primarily worked on the nodes and map clustering (comparison view vs. map view). Since the individual nodes could overlap in the map view, it made it hard to visually compare gains and losses, even though it lends an overall picture of what the region as a whole was experiencing. Therefore, I made a second view that reclustered all the nodes with no overlaps so that one could compare exchange amounts both within the continent and around the world. When a user hovers over a node, they can see the name of a country. If they click on it, not only does information specific to that country in the timeframe selected show up underneath, but the node also stays selected when switching views. As a result, it is possible to keep track of nodes across both views. This is useful in the map to comparison case because the geographical information is otherwise lost, and useful in the comparison to map case because when nodes overlap, that means that there are some that are not easy to click on in the map mode by itself. It took some time due to the complexity of what I had to do to make sure everything was grouped by continent, then the world, with no overlaps. Thus, I made sure to grey out the map with an indication to the user of what was happening in order to prevent the user from interfering while the visualization was carrying out the clustering operation. What I Learned: the powerful tools in d3.js, the challenges of integrating complex code from 3 people into one cohesive visualization, and of course, the complexity of territorial exchange over the last two centuries. Documentation: the final paper for this project is here and the visualization (only works in Firefox) is hosted here.

[sidlamaute]

A Day in the Life -- March 2019

Summary: I took Interactive Data Visualization as part of a concentration in Human-Computer Interfaces. For this assignment in the class, we had to tell a story with a data visualization. Mental health awareness and interventions are a major passion of mine, so I found a team who was also interested in visualizing how depression affects all sorts of individuals in their daily lives. The goal was to use this to spread awareness around mental health, particularly to de-stigmatize and build empathy. 

I did the majority of the coding for this project, which was written in d3.js--a new language to me. This involved connecting the CSV of data we found from a national survey on depression to the filters in the front-end and then randomly selecting 4 visual stories that fit the filtering criteria (which became the radar plots) to display. The second and third images depict what was displayed if there were not enough people who met the filtering criteria.

A reason we chose the radar plot was because the shrinking area covered as depression impacts more and more of one’s life visually conveys how little one is able to do compared to how much they could be doing due to depression. The color scheme was inspired by how we use the weather to convey moods--”blue skies” usually represents a good mood and positive outlook, whereas having a  “cloud hanging over” someone indicates a low mood. We used these colors to indicate how many days a survey respondent could not carry out daily activities--the more grey, the more days lost to depression. What I Learned: How to use d3.js, and of course, an even greater awareness of the diverse experiences of depression.  Documentation: the full writeup is here, and the visualization is hosted here.

[sidlamaute]

lovesimple -- Summer 2018

Summary: I was honored as an Open Style Lab at Parsons School of Design Fellow for 2018.  In this program, we were tasked with designing a wearable garment for an aging person with a disability. My team’s client is a wheelchair user in a rehabilitation facility who is dressed in bed, and thus we had to accommodate for those factors in creating two garments--a jacket and skirt. With her limited range of mobility, difficulty communicating, and need for assistance in mind, we made the ensemble focusing on speed, simplicity, comfort, and easy care. The jacket was designed so that she was able to put it on herself by allowing her to put it on and take it off from the front, as she could not reach behind her.  In fact, I specifically designed the two subtle holes in the seams of the collar for her to use by putting her finger in each one to pull the jacket over her head. The skirt was designed to make it easier for caregivers to dress her in bed by being able to slide it under her rather than having to make her lift herself up, which is fatiguing for her.  Both of these garments were designed for maximizing comfort in her wheelchair--the short back on the jacket prevented excess fabric in the back gathering between her and the chair, which used to happen with her traditional jacket. The skirt was designed with pants as the back to prevent any slippage of her undergarments or any wrinkling beneath her, as the latter could cause sores. Meanwhile, we had to account for her personal desires--cleanliness, in��addition to a love of art, bright colors, and elephants (with the trunk up for good luck).  For the body of the jacket, we used a bright blue (unfortunately misrepresented in the picture) stain- and wear-resistant fabric with a stretchier, light, moisture-wicking wool for the back of the jacket.  The skirt had a custom pattern on “flowy” sport lycra inspired by her relationship with her devoted husband, with comfortably conforming and odor-preventing wool for the rear of the skirt. The wool was specifically placed where she makes contact with the chair, addressing the areas where moisture and odor often accumulate. There’s also an article on the work we did this summer.

What I Learned: Garment design and fabric selection for specific qualities (e.g., the moisture- and odor-preventing qualities of wool mixed with synthetic fibers to be more durable for industrial washing), how to build for accessibility, and stronger skills in Adobe Illustrator.

[sidlamaute]

Live Objects in iOS -- Spring 2017

Summary: For my advanced senior project, I worked on the Live Objects project from the Object Based Media Group. The project’s goal was to connect any mobile device to a Live Object using WiFi to share content--without having any internet access. I had to take the existing project, which only worked on Android, and research a viable implementation in iOS. The reason it was much harder to implement in iOS was because Apple is not as permissive with letting developers control what WiFi network the phone is on. Therefore, I had to research a variety of ways to work around this in order for the phone to automatically connect to the Live Object. What I Learned: iOS programming (in Swift), obstacles pertaining to Apple’s security policies.

[sidlamaute]

Coming of Age, Page by Page -- May 2017

Summary: For the final project in Design: Information and Visualization, we had to use a data collection to make a visualization. I chose book data--more specifically, top ten Young Adult (YA) fiction bestsellers by year from the last decade. Since I've been reading YA literature for the last 10 years, I found it interesting to map out the trends in this genre I've been so devoted to. However, I decided to keep the project personal, by adding my own commentary to all the sections. What I Learned: continued experience with p5.js, as well as trends in YA fiction over a decade. Documentation: The p5.js code for this is on Github, and I recommend playing around with it to get a deeper sense of the work.

[sidlamaute]

Cloud Cascade -- April/May 2017

Summary: For the final project of Design: Thinking Through Making, we had to make an "aerial" installation. My group decided to make a rippling cloud canopy based on the mechanism from a Jacob's Ladder. Instead of flat rectangles, we used triangular prisms for each link of this play on a Jacob’s Ladder so that modules could catch the wind and rotate. Also, instead of just one “ladder”, we had 3 next to each other to form the canopy. The “ladders” were strung up overhead with lines going through the ends of the ladders and anchored to the walls of the courtyard. The modules were made from fiberglass kite rods and ripstop Nylon in order to make them as light as possible. It was conceptually very cool and looked very pretty, but it’s still hard to get strong enough winds for these ladders that we made as light as possible. Still, by gently tapping the modules of the “ladder” into the air, one could trigger the ripple effect. What I Learned: machine sewing ripstop nylon, how Jacob’s ladders work, and an understanding of the need for even lighter ultra-light materials to cooperate with reasonable wind speeds.

[sidlamaute]

I/You -- April 2017

Summary: In Design: Information and Visualization, we had to collect data for a week. I picked a personal project and monitored how often "I" and "You" came up in conversations with my closest friends. My broader question was whether the conversation more often revolved around me or was more balanced.  Even though a visual was not required, I ended up sketching a binary star representation, influenced by my Type 1a Supernovae project, to show who took up more of the mass of each conversation.

As a fun fact, the title and idea were inspired by the lyrics from Faces by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. What I Learned: creative data collection, as well as a lot about myself.

[sidlamaute]

Rhododendron - March 2017

For Design: Information and Visualization, we had to take some aspect of weather data and render it in an interesting way for a phone app. My first thoughts hearkened back to my childhood home, where I would look out the windows daily and see rhododendrons. These plants' leaves expand apart or contract together depending on the temperature outside. Knowing this growing up helped me decide how much I needed to bundle up. Therefore, I decided to recreate a simple version of this experience that allows the user to see how the rhododendron would look at different times of that very day, to get a sense of the temperature. Unfortunately the pictures were taken on a day when the temperature varied little, but one can observe that the flower on top corresponds to time of day as well. The p5.js code is here for anyone to try.

[sidlamaute]

Core - March 2017

In Design: Thinking Through Making, we had to take a physical process such as rotation, oscillation, state change, etc. to make an object generator.  By building a rig that allows oscillation with varying string lengths sustained by the force of a heat gun, I explored the irregularities that could be created from melting wax spheres. Not only are they visually interesting, but I also learned that these objects also form different tactile experiences.

[sidlamaute]

Type 1a Supernovae - February 2017

For the class Design: Thinking Through Making, we had to take a scientific phenomenon and through researching its rules come up with computer-generated designs. I chose Type 1a Supernovae--which are explained further in-depth in the booklet. I took the rules from how the stars interact in this type of supernova and put them in Processing, and by experimenting with them, achieved these results. The code and the other images and documentation are also located on Github.

[sidlamaute]

VIVAMUS -- December 2016

Summary: I made this for the class Design: Objects and Interaction. The final assignment for this class was to make an unconventional clock.  Consequently, my first idea was to create the ultimate countdown clock: a death clock. Many websites exist that allow one to voluntarily seek out how much time is left in life, but I instead imagined an experience in which one was always aware, throughout one’s entire life. Therefore, I designed the “clock” as a scarf, since it could be worn throughout the day, and it also rests just within one’s peripheral vision as a casual, yet constant reminder. It is represented as a chain of lights, which shortens as one gets older.  Then from a statistical calculation, every time that someone in the wearer’s age range dies, the chain of lights scrolls the length of the scarf, which means that as the user gets older, the scrolling gets more and more frequent as death weighs on the mind, which plays into the importance or meaning of the scarf changing with the user’s age and situation, depicted in the video. The chain of lights, when tied in with the theme of the fabric scarf with frayed edges, is a reminder of the Fates from Ancient Roman and Greek mythology.  In fact, one of my main influences for the motivation of a death scarf that is white and light come from my years of study of Roman culture. Throughout their literature, there is often a theme of living with the knowledge of death in mind.  For example, a phrase often used today is “memento mori,” which translates to “remember to die,” but more figuratively means “stay humble, remember we will all die someday.”  The project itself is actually named based on a different Latin quote that also plays into the theme—“ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene,” which means “therefore, let’s live, while it is allowed to be well.”  These quotes are not so much reminders of death as a dark subject, but rather using mortality to encourage various good values, from humility to excitement.  What I Learned: using individually addressable LEDs with an Arduino.

[sidlamaute]

Hover Table -- Fall 2015

Summary: For the class Digital Design Lab, which meshed with my unofficial Signals, Systems, and Controls concentration, my partner and I decided to make a PID-controlled* height adjustable hover table using an FPGA**. While my partner worked on the code for the FPGA, I worked on actually building the hover table, which involved winding electromagnets by hand and designing the components such that the physics worked out.  The main challenge in this part was determining how big of electromagnets I could make with the current source we had, and from there, the maximum weight of the tabletop to be able to control its height with an object of approximately 5 grams on it. What I Learned: How to make electromagnets, laser cutting, and how to persist in the face of physics, including iterative design for the tabletop.

Documentation: presentation, final report

*PID: Proportional-Integral-Derivative. It uses terms proportional to the error, the integral of the error, and the derivative of the error to change an original state to a desired state. **FPGA: Field-Programmable Gate Array.  It can be programmed in a Hardware Description Language (in this case, Verilog) to physically replicate desired digital logic.

[sidlamaute]

Empathy Replicator™ -- November 2016

Summary: For the class Design: Objects and Interaction, we were assigned to make a wearable. Since I am interested in wearable devices for mental health, I wanted to make a mask that shows how people lie about their emotions as part of daily life.  While initially my inclination was to make something high tech, as I always have when working in wearables, I was encouraged to take it in a different direction. I explored other ways to change expression, and ended up with the Empathy Replicator™, a product designed to help customer service workers spare their facial muscles from consistent effort.  Instead of having to produce a genuine smile with crinkling eyes, or having to feign concern, one can switch in various emotions with this glasses-like structure. What I Learned: Genuine emotions are largely expressed in the eyes, as well as laser cutting and manipulating the resulting acrylic by conforming it to the curve of a face with a heat gun.

Documentation: video (for which I composed the music), class blog post

[sidlamaute]

Lace Chainmail -- October 2016

Summary: For the class Design: Objects and Interaction, we had to create a 3D-printed textile.  As we looked over the history of textiles, I was struggling to come up with anything that could be novel, and especially found chainmail boring and overdone.  After more thought, however, I remembered some of what I learned in a Knot Theory class I took in high school, especially a special link called the Borromean Rings.  They are assembled in a set of three, as shown below:

If one ring is removed, the whole link falls apart, because no two rings are actually linked with each other.  This therefore results in a delicate, nearly impractical, but beautiful chainmail--a lace chainmail. What I Learned: How to use Rhinoceros, 3D printing best practices, and physical constraints on mathematical theory. Documentation: class blog post