Category: Archive-2018

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