P1 Guest Talk: Interactions in real and virtual worlds

Title

Interactions in real and virtual worlds

Abstract 

Designers of interactive systems often focus on interfaces or physical affordances, but what matters most for the users of these interactive systems is the interaction. To understand these interactions – what people notice, how they understand things, and how they respond – it can be helpful to set up empirical experiments, to see what people do. Prototypes and simulation environments make it possible to perform these empirical experiments during the design phase, before actual systems or contexts are in place. In this talk, we look at new methods and techniques for eliciting people’s implicit and explicit interactive behaviours towards novel vehicles and robots, including field prototypes studies, virtual reality studies, and immersive digital twins.  

Bio

Wendy Ju is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and previously worked as an Executive Director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford University. She is also an inaugural faculty member of Cornell’s new campus-wide multidisciplinary Design Tech department, and an Associate Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at Technion. Professor Ju’s work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Her current research focus is on everyday urban interaction. 

Professor Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.