What are you buying?
What are you buying into?

As the considerations people bring to everyday purchases grow increasingly sophisticated and varied, printed product labels become less effective as a means to assist consumer decision making.

Mobile devices hold great potential to inform modern purchases, but directing them towards product information can be cumbersome and error-prone.

Laser barcode readers have offered retailers point-and-click ease for years, and can be leveraged to inform consumers as well. In the system I have implemented above, a modified key-chain barcode scanner eases access to health & sustainability information. Scanned barcodes are read wirelessly by custom mobile phone software and used to access a remote database maintained by GoodGuide^TM, a pioneering product information service in the Bay Area.

Imagine you are a jet-setting Muslim businessman, straddling cultural contexts.

Your holy book asks that you pray facing Mecca, but you are in an unfamiliar airport, hotel room or office building. Which way do you turn?

"Face Mecca" is a mobile application designed for the traveling Muslim. It leverages the location and compass capabilities of new mobile phones to provide a modern solution to an ancient challenge.

Hanover, New Hampshire, USA is home to a small but vibrant community of student animators. Year after year & frame by frame, these students create delightfully idiosyncratic short films that amuse, challenge & inspire viewers at festivals world-wide. To celebrate the ingenuity and the humanity of these animators, I created the compilation: Dartmouth Animation Highlights: 1997-2000.

In its public communications, the Interaction Design Centre must strike a delicate balance between playful enthusiasm (to attract researchers, technologists & designers), and professional polish (to attract corporate, academic & government interests). Designing the IDC site provided the chance to learn how to balance the needs of some very different stakeholders, and created an opportunity to examine an organization's values, practices & working culture along the way.

How does a floor see the world? Z-Tiles is about making a floor's perspective accessible for the study & appreciation of human movement. By making weight visible, Z-Tiles opens new opportunities for domains such as medicine, dance, security & sports science.

Technically speaking, Z-Tiles demonstrates a self-organizing dense sensor network. Each z-tile is a modular, interlocking & pressure-sensitive floor tile that communicates with neighboring tiles electronically to create & maintain a digital representation of a physical floorspace.

Visualizing field lines is a difficult challenge for many students of the physical sciences. Software tools exist to facilitate this task, however most are created for developers in industry, not students at college. Fieldplot is a field visualization tool I created with Professor Ulf Osterburg for engineering students at Dartmouth College. It provides an exploratory environment that students can access with minimal initial learning.

During the early '90s when the rise of internet-based business had travel agents pondering their collective future, TAEdge bravely set out to support this community. Its mission: intuit the needs of mom & pop travel agencies throughout the U.S, and develop tools and services to support their work.

The TAEdge Site Builder is one result of this initiative. This tool empowers travel agents to make their own offerings & expertice available on-line, without the overhead & hassle of web development and hosting.

In Ireland, an estimated one out of seven children suffers from asthma. While a cure remains elusive, this condition can be managed. Visibreath is an initiative sponsored by the Irish government, with the aim of introducing children to domestic asthma management techniques through mobile gaming. By embedding daily spirometer (lung capacity) checks within the familiar context of game play, we seek to motivate children to become active participants in their own care.

A key part of this initiative was the development of a compact, robust & inexpensive hand-held device for breath flow measurement; a device suitable for use by children. My role in this effort was to realize tangible forms for the device from concept sketches through computer-aided rapid-prototyping.

As hand-held digital devices grow ever smaller & more capable, providing them with intuitive controls becomes increasingly challenging. Hand gestures offer an intriguing possibility for control that is largely independent of device size & surface area. For my Bachelor of Engineering project, I worked with a team to explore the viability of gestural control for personal digital assistants. We found simple gestures & simple recognition techniques surprisingly effective in the face of more sophisticated alternatives. The investigation was conducted for Analog Devices, a leading manufacturer of inertial sensors.

Studies demonstrate that people woken from REM sleep – a sleep state identifiable by rapid eye movements – rise more refreshed & alert than when woken from non-REM sleep. Could this result be harnessed to ease the process of waking up on a workday?

Intrigued by the prospect of a kinder & gentler alarm clock, my project team in Introduction to Engineering devised a clock sensitive to REM/nREM sleep states. At best, its alarm sounded at moments favorable to waking, at worst it functioned as a standard alarm clock.

Though the prototype functioned, and was a respectable technical achievement for my team, it failed to satisfy basic user requirements for physical & psychological comfort. The clock's failure in use opened my eyes to the world of interface & interaction design.

In this short animated film,
a student finds & shares an
unusual way to deal with
test anxiety.

Alternative Energy MicroBlimp

One interesting toy to emerge during the early ‘90s was the radio-controlled microblimp, a miniature airship that affords pilots 15-30 minutes of carefree flight before falling to the earth; inert & powerless.

When I first saw a microblimp, its reflective & rounded form reminded me of a solar collector dish. Could a blimp bag be constructed, I wondered, so as to harness available light & power the blimp indefinitely? Thus began a whirl-wind introduction to non-imaging optics, power electronics & dirigible construction that culminated in a visit to Aerovironment, the pioneer of solar & pedal-powered flight. Though the technical challenge of realizing an alternative-energy microblimp proved beyond my abilities at the time, this project sharpened my resolve to seek out projects that expose interdependency of form & function.