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Hi there!

I’m Romy - a designer, researcher and recent Harvard grad, dedicated to unlocking civic innovation, rethinking humane technology and experimenting with any new tool that comes my way. 


Find out more:
︎ Information
︎ Linkedin
︎ Resume








Currently researching / interested in:
︎ Collective intelligence
︎ Design Fiction
︎ Civic Futures
︎ Fixing Social Media

Favorite / recommended podcasts:
︎ Your Undivided Attention 
︎ Invisibilia 
︎ Recode Decode

Currently reading:
︎ Adverdarial Design
︎ Speculative Everything
Featured            UX Design            Code            WorldBuilding


SOCIABOWL

MIT Media Lab | 2018
Collaborators: Joanne Leong, Yuehan Wang
Instructor: Hiroshi Ishii
Selected for CHI 2019
Published at ACM Digital Library
Duration: 1 month
Tools Used: CAD, Adobe Suite, Arduino

︎ Problem: Conversations can sometimes be imbalanced when some participants have more dominant characters and others tend to wait for their turn passively.
︎ Solution: A dynamic centerpiece that aims to mediate group discussions.




Problem


Conversations can sometimes be imbalanced when some participants have more dominant characters and others tend to wait for their turn passively.

How might we assist conversations to give voices to those unheard?



Ideation


We thought about up to 15 different design solutions, some of which were more artistic while others were wearables. We found that both did not provide a group feedback loop. That is when the idea of a “centerpiece” seemed the most promising to pursue.








Solution


SociaBowl aims to mediate group discussions that are sometimes imbalanced and polarized. A centerpiece actuated by touch can move to reward a thoughtful speaker when the bowl is filled with candy or can act as a threat to those who chat for too long if filled with liquid .
Input and output ideation

Touch, Swipe Up and Swipe Down


Water, Pens, Hourglass and Candy as the SociaBowl



Solution

Fabrication process



Results




The project was selected for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI 2019), and was published on the Arduino Blog and the ACM Digital Library.

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