HCII 30
Chronicling 30 years of academic research with tactile and digital artifacts to gamify research discovery for a broader audience
Timeline
3 Months
Summer 2024
Summer 2024
Role
Sole Visual Designer
Student Researcher
Student Researcher
Tools
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Indesign
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Indesign
With
Dan Saffer (Faculty Advisor)
3 Student Researchers
3 Student Researchers
My Role
Visual identity & defining deliverables
As the sole visual designer, I created the project visual identity and all project visual assets, from print to web.
With the team, I helped with researching 200+ HCII faculty papers, defining project deliverables, and writing content for the flashcards.
Project Context
What does HCII Do?
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU works on more than interfaces or websites, with imaginative projects ranging from room-scale smart-walls (Wall++, 2018) or a playful snack-delivery robot (Snackbot, 2009). The breadth of HCI research here at CMU is important to HCII's pioneering success, and something we needed to celebrate!
The Challenge
How might we engage academic experts and the general public with highly technical research in a way that is fun yet accessible?
Including research projects from every current faculty? Without oversimplifying the content? With one cohesive experience?
54 Card Flashcard Set
Each card highlights the big idea and key takeaways of an impactful HCII faculty research project, with a QR code linking to the full paper for further exploration.
Flashcard Box
Informative yet playful packaging for the entire flashcard set.
Celebrating the breadth of HCII
8 card categories: New Interactions, Design Research, Education Technology, Robotics, Social Computing, AI, Accessibility & Ethics, Safety & Privacy.
Research
Gathering and summarizing 250+ notable research papers and projects from 30 years of HCII Research
With 3 other student researchers, we started out by gathering, reading, and summarizing over 250 papers that were either recommended by faculty, award-winning, most cited, or most downloaded. Each person read and summarized ~80 papers, and we realized the full breath of research we were tasked to honor and represent.
Card Design
Creating responsive card components for easy filling of card content and ideation
Since I was tasked to design the cards before we had finish writing our text, I created a custom component system that would be responsive to any text added, allowing me to easily iterate the cards and eventually fill in the text very quickly.
Web Experience Design
Connecting to a web experience that incentivizes users to delve deeper and learn more
Each physical card leads to the associated research paper, and our entire set connects to the interactive web experience with corresponding digital cards where users can not only look into the paper, but also view related video and project content. This experience is designed to engage general audiences with a fun interface while ensuring that academic users have easy access to in-depth information.
Brand Identity
A fun, design-tool inspired brand
Reflection
Disseminating research, defining my own deliverables
Identifying stakeholders and their needs early on is key:
When we finally met as a team in person, we were able to map out different stakeholders and what they would want from this project, which helped us quickly narrow down what design solutions best suited everyone's needs. Prior to this, I really felt in the dark about all the research and paper summarizing and what it was leading to and if I were to do this again, I would definitely want to start with identifying our stakeholder needs early on.
When we finally met as a team in person, we were able to map out different stakeholders and what they would want from this project, which helped us quickly narrow down what design solutions best suited everyone's needs. Prior to this, I really felt in the dark about all the research and paper summarizing and what it was leading to and if I were to do this again, I would definitely want to start with identifying our stakeholder needs early on.