Author: re_admin

by Ritwik Kaikini

Concept

Noema is a concept introduced in phenomenology by Husserl, a french philosopher, as something to do with the ‘thought’ and what these thoughts are all about. It is in a way, the start to our thinking and our whole imagination. If we think about the world, the world is like a series of thoughts collectively constructed into a single collective conscious mind. All animals big or small, humans, fire, water, earth, the smallest creatures like bacteria, the smallest grains of sand, the vast roads circling the earth, they all form a collective consciousness which influences the world in its own way. There is energy being transferred between each of these elements in their own simple ways. I wanted to develop an immersive installation, guided by my own soundtrack, which gives us the experience of being small and insignificantly futile compared to our collective consciousness. I wanted to cultivate a sense of guided spirituality through the sounds, visuals and video narratives.

by Shruthy Sreepathy

Working at ArtSciLab is so much fun because I am always encouraged to explore and try new UX research methods. I thought we should try affinity diagramming exercise and in preparation for this exercise, I read Karen Holtzblatt’s Contextual Design and Universal Methods of Design by Bella Martin and Bruce Hanington. According to Martin, affinity diagramming “…is a process used to externalize and meaningfully cluster observations and insights from research, keeping design teams grounded in data as they design.”
The goal of this exercise was to make sense of the data gathered through usability testing of the ARTECA project to understand areas of concern, major problems that need to be addressed immediately, and see some common issues across participants. This exercise helped us group observations and comments from usability tests into meaningful clusters, which guide us through to understand the area of concern. We slightly modified the activity by using different color sticky notes to represent different participants, since we did not have enough sticky notes to put up all the points from five usability test reports. It was an amazing experience to see patterns emerge from this activity.

In February, Professor Cassini Nazir, Joel Ewing, Duncan Gallagher, and I decided to try this activity for the first time for the ARTECA project. We gathered five usability test reports (usability testing is an enriching observational research method for the ARTECA project. Read my Usability test blog post to know more about it), cleared out the whiteboard, printed all the test reports, gathered sharpies and sticky notes to begin the activity. We had an hour to complete the activity so we decided to time box the activity. We had 20 minutes to scribble quotes and findings from reports and stick them up on the wall.
In the next 20 minutes, without discussing we moved the sticky notes to form affinity of the points put up on the wall. There were few loner points, a few that had to be grouped into smaller affinity, and some that required reconsideration. We utilized the last 20 minutes to discuss and iterate on the process to come to a logical conclusion. At the end of the hour we had little clusters that highlighted about multiple issues.

So what did we learn from this activity?

• Use of different color notes to represent different usability test participants helped us see at a broader level how many participants faced similar issues or the same problem.
• Similar issues were faced by multiple test participants. For example, the patterns gave us a solid evidence that search feature is an area of concern- it was not just multiple problems faced by one participant, but different color notes informed us that almost all participants had similar issues.
• Test participants couldn’t find grey literature page, pricing information, and ARTECA branding on search page. Working up the hierarchy of affinity diagram we figured that discoverability is an area of concern.

When we completed the exercise we identified functionality, discoverability, and look & feel were some of the overarching areas that need to be addressed. Now the next step is to figure out solutions and improve the design.
Shruthy Sreepathy is a M.S neuroscience graduate student specializing in Human-Computer Interaction. She is involved with UT Dallas ArtSciLab since Fall 2016 as a designer and Drupal developer for ARTECA. Her focus is in UX design and development.

Kathryn Evans, Roger Malina and Eun Ah Lee of the ArtSciLab at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) are announcing the launch of CDASH 2.0, a new website for curriculum in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities.

The CDASH project is interested in the collection of a broad range of curriculum that combines the performing and visual arts (music, dance, theatre, film, visual arts and new media) and the sciences. Of most particular interest are curriculum submissions of in-person, on-line and hybrid blended courses taught during formal graduate, undergraduate, primary/secondary and informal education.
This new website allows teachers and professors to easily enter the details of their course(s). Users must register and create a login before submitting a course and those who submit syllabi will gain entry to the Cloud Curriculum, where they have access to view/download other syllabi, find resources, and participate in on-line discussions and projects.
Please submit your course today!
For more information, contact us at cdash@utdallas.edu.
 
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Our international collaborators are Robert Root-Bernstein (Univ. of Michigan, USA), Paul Thomas (Univ. of New South Wales, Australia), Annick Bureaud (OLATS, France), Lucinda Presley (Innovation Collaborative, USA), Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute, USA), Julia Buntaine (Rutgers Univ and Exec. Ed., ScuArt Magazine, USA), Jane Prophet ( Univ. of London, UK), Laurie Baefsky (Exec. Editor, A2RU, Univ. of Michigan, USA), Joao Silveira (Univ. Fed. do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Alex Garcia-Topete (UTD, USA and Mexico), Yvan Tina (UTD, USA and France), and Sharath Chandra Ram (UTD, USA and Bangalore).

This project is co-sponsored by The ArtSciLab at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), the UTD School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, and The UTD Center for Teaching and Learning.

… a party at the Malina’s this Sunday, April 15th in Dallas, Texas in celebration of Yuri’s Night! Feel free to stop by anytime from 2pm to midnight and if you are interested in coming or know of any others who would be, please email rxm116130@utdallas.edu for an official invite. We hope to see you there!
 

by Joel Ewing

In 2016, the summer before my freshman year at UT Dallas, I participated in UT Dallas’ Clark Summer Research Program. The Clark Summer Research Program is a unique opportunity that pairs incoming freshmen at UT Dallas with research groups to gain hands-on experience for nine weeks while they work alongside talented students and faculty. For many students, myself included, it is the first exposure to academic research.
When I arrived on campus at the beginning of that summer, I was not sure what to expect.  Making the jump from my home in Kentucky to UT Dallas had unique challenges. I did not know anyone in the area, and the campus and city were unfamiliar to me.  Fortunately, I befriended several of my fellow “Clarkies” who helped me to adjust and remain some of my closest friends.

by Kuo-Wei Lee, Shruthy Sreepathy, Yusra Khan

Students from the ArtSciLab hosted on ArtSide,at the 10th annual RAW: Research-Art-Writing Conference at The University of Texas at Dallas in February.
Kuo-Wei Lee (M.A. ’18, Arts and Technology), Shruthy Sreepathy, and Yusra Khan (both M.S. ’18, Applied Cognition and Neuroscience) presented ArtSide: Enhancing the Connection Between Cities and Communities. ArtSide—Lee’s master’s thesis, first prototyped in Professor Cassini Nazir’s Creating Interactive Media course—aims to enhance the social experience of public art through social and technological and strengthen the relationship between city and its communities.

Editor’s Note: Freshman JoAnn Nguyen recently joined the ArtSciLab in an ongoing project role- but her first experience working with us was last summer through the Clark Scholars Program. Read on below to hear JoAnn’s first-hand account of her summer experience. Sound interesting? Contact us about opportunities for Summer 2018.
My first day of summer had nothing to do with my regular summer routine of binge watching Netflix on my living room couch while eating an obscene amount of unhealthy food. Instead, spent it at UT Dallas two and a half months before officially began college. I and 27 other Clark Research Scholars had signed away nine weeks of our summer break to begin research on campus.
This summer, I started interning for the ArtSciLab located in the ATEC (Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications) building at UT Dallas and it was nothing like any other jobs I had before. I am an upcoming business student that has a knack for learning about computers and experience with sculptural art so being assigned to work for the ArtSciLab was a good fit for my background.
The first week I started interning I explored the posh looking lab and got caught up with what projects the lab was working on such as ARTECA and Creative Disturbance. After meeting Professor Cassini Nazir and Emma Newkirk, the lab manager, I was assigned to work on CDASH, Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. The website is run by Dr. Kathryn Evans and is intended to display interdisciplinary courses globally that cross between the disciplines of art and science. As more and more professors became interested in the site, Katheryn realized there was a need to update the current webpage. I was assigned to redevelop the site which required utilizing WordPress, a website development tool, and implicating the elements of user experience to increase the site’s usability.
At first I was utterly lost. Although I had a bit of knowledge in java and design, web design was something completely new and I was scrambling around to find anything I could understand. It was daunting thinking about where to even start but luckily my professor stepped in to guide me through the process. I had so many questions throughout the CDASH project –  from making a prototype to using WordPress and HTML and every time he answered all of them patiently and with genuinely. I was lucky to be working in the lab during the summer when my professor had more free time to answer any of my concerns. Before weekly CDASH meetings Professor Cassini made sure I was prepared and that I wasn’t left astray and it was nice knowing that I had someone to reach out to when I was utterly lost.
As the summer progressed I was making progress. I created a prototype and a content map for the site and presented it at a meeting with the CDASH team and both helped with planning out the development of the site. Things were moving at a fast pace and I was trying to hold on. By the end of the summer I had created a basic website that could be expanded and core functionality. The site is still being in development and I have hopes that it will be up and running by the spring semester.
Although my summer was mostly about developing a website for the lab there were other things I got to participate in. NAEA, National Art Education Association, held its annual meeting in the ATEC building this summer and I got to volunteer with Emma. I witness the principles of design being implemented and talked to art educators across the nation. I even ran into Debra Moore who is part of the Edith O’Donnell Foundation that had hosted an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art that I was a part of. I also got the opportunity to sit in at a lunch meeting with local business leaders that were part of a group called XD Leadership Alliance and I would have never gotten these opportunities to be exposed to the professional world had I not been interning in the lab this summer.
Overall my experience in the ArtSciLab was a great experience. The biggest lesson I learned is that there are so many ways to solve a problem and for the first time in my life there isn’t a set right answer. Creating the CDASH website was challenging at times but it was worth knowing that I was learning and contributing to something.

About the author

JoAnn is an undergraduate student studying Finance and Marketing at the University of Texas at Dallas.  She interned at the ArtSciLab during the Summer of 2017 as a web developer for CDASH.

by Shruthy Sreepathy

I work as UX researcher and designer for ARTECA project at ArtSciLab. My primary responsibility is to lead usability testing for the ARTECA website, analyze and report test results, and implement the changes.
What is usability testing and why do we do it? Usability testing is an observational research method. It gives qualitative user inputs, and lets designers converse with and observe users. Observing participant emotion and reaction gives a lot of insight and helps understand user expectation. This tells us about the areas of improvement in the website design and instills ideas for new feature implementation.

Welcome João!
We are pleased to announce that João Silveira has been appointed as a Visiting ArtScience Researcher in the ArtSciLab. João will be collaborating with other members of the lab to understand and analyze current ArtScience developments internationally.

João Silveira is a Brazilian dancer with experience of over 4000 career performances on tours around the world. Trained as a pharmacist, he explores art and science in his work, is Founder of the ArteCiencia project and author of the book Da Ideia ao Aplauso
Born in southern Brazil in 1980, João started to dance at the age of 10. His professional life as a dancer began when he was 14 years old, performing in shows, creating choreographies and teaching dance classes.
Since then, he has built up a very consistent career participating in both national and international productions, always mixing in boleadoras, folkloric ballet, tap, percussion, traditional music, electronic music and any other style that could improve his performance. The United States, Argentina, France, Japan, Lebanon, Monaco, Paraguay, Uruguay, Germany, and Romania are some of the countries where he has already shown his work as well as more than 300 cities throughout Brazil.
João is also a pharmacist. With his multidisciplinary background in art and science, João is a Harvard Research Fellow – Faculty of Arts & Sciences (SEAS) and is completing a PhD in Science at the Medical Biochemistry Department at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is studying the “Art, artist and artistic interaction with science.” The goal is to investigate how interactions between art and science occur, and what are the results of these two fields having dialogue based on a contemporary investigation of projects in Brazil and the United States.
You can read more about João and his work on Harvard’s website and at joaosilveira.org

We are excited to announce the launch of CDASH 2.0! 
Project leads Kathryn Evans, Roger Malina, and Eun Ah Lee are pleased to announce the re-launch of our 2012 project studying Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities at cdash.atec.io.
Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina and  UT Dallas faculty member Kathryn Evans are inventorying examples of courses and curricula that are in the art-science–humanities field such as courses on art and biology, music and mathematics, art and chemistry, dance and environmental sciences, etc. The re-launched CDASH inventory includes over 120 courses. We are seeking courses at the graduate, undergraduate and primary/secondary level.
Individuals who have taught an art-science-humanities course at the university or secondary-school level, in formal or informal settings, are invited to submit their course on our new CDASH website.
After you log in or register, you may submit you course through an easy-to-complete form.  Those who submit syllabi will have access to the Cloud Curriculum portion of the site, where they can access other syllabi and resource material.
We are interested in the broad range of curriculum that combines the performing and visual arts (music, dance, theatre, film, visual arts and new media) and the sciences. We are looking for submissions of in-person, on-line and hybrid blended courses.
Our new website allows you to easily enter your course and all the relevant details.  Please log in or register before you submit your course. You may also access the other areas of the site. Those who submit syllabi will be admitted to the Cloud Curriculum, where you can download other syllabi and resources.
This project is co-sponsored by The ArtSciLab at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD),  the UTD School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication , and The UTD Center for Teaching and Learning.
For more information, contact us at cdash@utdallas.edu.