Circuit Tree

Here's a brief summary of my Circuit Tree. It's still in a prototyping stage but I'm quite glued to the idea.

My goal is to create a sculpture that encourages participants to interact with it and create collaborative art. Specifically I made the tree where each leaf, when touched, changes colors from an internal, bright LED . As all of the leaves are connected together, the tree can "shiver" when touched. Depending on how long an individual touches the leaf, the response can change. With 30+ leaves on the tree, this becomes a 3d interactive display - light bright 3.0 if you will. People can try to change all the leaves to one color or put patterns into the leaves. The tree then retains a history - why is the tree blue now, who did that?

As an additional part of my work, I measure people's physiological arousal - what makes them excited and frustrated. I'm planning on connecting my tree to wireless sensors that measure excitement. As a participant gets more and more excited, the tree changes colors. Perhaps, when calm the tree is blue, but as the audience becomes more excited, the tree changes red and starts flashing more dynamic patterns of color.

Using Physiological Arousal as a Marker for Emotional Experiences

 Summer 2010 - Present

As customers, products and services are an experience. Standing in a long line for a coffee may be a part of a frustrating experience. Seeing a picture of your family during a phone call may be a happy one. How do we measure these emotional experiences with products and services?

In this study, the LEGO group and I measured people's electrodermal activity—a marker of an arousing event—to enhance post-interviews about user's experiences: people provided deeper, more informative stories when asked to describe specific arousing moments.

Specifically, I designed and ran an experiment measuring the experiences of 50 different people with a new LEGO product. I conducted open ended interviews and asked people about specific moments when their EDA increased. I generated an internal paper identifying 17 key insights on how the LEGO Groups new product affects people's emotions. I worked with designers, writers, and administrators in realizing this project. In addition, to a report, I taught the LEGO group how to use these tools independently for future projects.

Masters Thesis: IN‐SITU MEASUREMENT OF ELECTRODERMAL ACTIVITY DURING OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY

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(Summer 2009- Spring 2010)

How could knowing a child’s electrodermal activity (EDA) during therapy change occupational therapy practices? As a joint project between the MIT Media Lab and the Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation, we measured the EDA responses of 22 children participating in occupational therapy for 77 hours. We saw children lying in a ball pit and their EDA correspondingly decreasing; we saw children’s EDA rapidly increase while they were swinging; and we saw many other patterns of responses from different therapeutic activities. Could we show how different guided activities changed children’s arousal with a statistical test? Analysis suggests that many factors play a role in changing children’s EDA, and these factors could not all be taken into account with our low sample size – making any statistical analysis inconclusive. As more tools begin to measure physiological data over longer periods of time, in less controlled settings, we should not forget to build a base understanding at the individual case level.

Three Key Factors that Influence EDA in Observational Studies of Occupational Therapy

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Fall 2010

This poster was based off of my Masters Thesis