Category: Archive

Sonification is the use of sound to convey information or data. It is an alternative to data visualization. Micro Lux Chants is a collaborative project between the ArtSciLab and the Gassensmith Lab (Biochemistry lab) at UT Dallas.

Professor Roger Malina hosted Yuri’s night on April 15 at his residence. Professor Malina is a physicist, astronomer, and executive editor of Leonardo Publications at The MIT Press. He is also the Director of the ArtSciLab.

With graduation just around the corner, the future becomes clear for graduating students. They have a goal set in their mind; they want to work their dream job where they can apply their skill-set and what they have learned through their degree. Four masters-level students of the ArtSciLab, graduating in Spring 2018, share their interests and future plans after they graduate.

Sabre- An Innovative Technology Company is a travel technology company based in Southlake, TX. It is the largest Global Distribution Systems provider for air bookings in North America. Sabre is a global technology company whose “innovative technology is used by more than a billion people around the world to plan, book and get to their destination at a time and price that’s right for them.”

It is common to change career paths to find job satisfaction, personal interest, or just to add another feather in one’s hat. Few people change their career paths because of their passion to learn and understand the semantics. Shruthy Sreepathy chose to become a User Experience (UX) researcher/designer to understand the implications of design and to answer one important question: How can we make experiences better?

by Anvit Srivastav

Anvit, a Computer Science Masters student at UTD (Class of 2015), was primarily focused on studying network security. He already had web development skills and thought that a concentration in network security would be beneficial for his future plans. Surprisingly, the way Anvit ended up working in the lab and meeting Roger wasn’t directly related to his studies at all.

This past March, Yvan Tina, the coordinator of the Creative Disturbance podcast project in the ArtSciLab, defended his dissertation at the School of Arts and Humanities of Aix-Marseille University in Aix-En-Provence. Yvan’s PhD program is very unique in the fact that it is a joint supervision thesis between Aix-Marseille University and UT Dallas under the direction of Professor Yannick Butel (Aix-Marseille University) and Roger Malina (UT Dallas).
Yvan presented his dissertation at Aix-Marseille University on March 16, 2018 about the use of artificial intelligence and biotechnology in art has led to a radical reformulation of theater as living performance.

by Sharath Chandra Ram

edited by JoAnn Nguyen

‘Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity’ was hosted at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the cybernetic serendipity exhibition curated in 1968 that brought together experimental electronic and interactive media artists under one roof. The event brought together leading experts from the fields of technology, art and science who were trying to deal with complex questions that surround transdisciplinary collaborations and was supported and funded by Google inc. and the Arthur M Sackler Foundation.

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.