Story of an idea

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Scientific curiosity is a deeply beautiful kind of play; it attracts people who seek to understand the causal links which affect our world and should be accessible to everyone

From my grad school personal statement (December 2020)

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Audio as a shared distanced social experience

Sound travels father than 2 metres. A group of friends can experience the same sound while maintaining safe distances outside. 

How might we create outdoor sound experiences which encourage friends and family to interact in meaningful ways while distanced?

If intimate social experiences require some kind of privacy, could separated audio environments provide the perception of a small enclosed space?

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Organize “bubble” thanksgiving

In wake of a 28 day ban of all indoor gatherings in Montreal, looks like many of us will be spending thanksgiving inside of our apartment bubbles. While video calls can share faces and voices, much of social experience in commonly experiencing taste, smells, and space. 

This idea is to have each participating household prepare a dish, pack it into takeout containers, then drop it off in a central location where the others can also drop off and pick up food. Bringing them safely back inside their house, all the houses can video call eachother while enjoying eachothers food. 

A similar idea could be to all make a similar dish, and be able to comment and share thoughts about eachothers creation in live time at the virtual dinner. 

– September 29 @7:30pm. Brainstorming virtual events to host which bring people together in a more natural authenticate way during the home ban.

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I live for small human idiosyncrasies. Like setting the TV volume to an even number, or throwing out “old” water glasses.

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Drawable QR codes which connects physical paper and pen to an internet link

QR codes aren’t easily drawn, https://www.meshtag.com/ requires you download a separate app. How might someone drawing in a notebook, easily and seamlessly link a reader to a virtual object?

– July 18, 2020. Thinking about how I could show something from a website on a physical notebook I share with a friend, so that she could see what I meant.

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– March 16, 2019 @7:52pm. VR Cinema at Phi Centre, Montreal.

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Create a tool which captures linguistic style of users, and presents it for designers to use in copy

We tend to like and respond well to people who speak like us. In certain circles, we naturally gravitate towards formal or informal speech, our tone of voice and prosody can change, and we might add certain words or slang into our vocabulary where we ordinarily wouldn’t. 

When building experiences with artificial agents, this kind of conversational knowledge could help breath life into how a bot or brand speaks to its’ users. If you feed it knowledge of rock climbing, it should be able to use the lingo shared by climbers as well. What if we took a dataset of conversations between users, had an AI parse the speech for patterns and differences compared baseline speech, and presented that list to designers? Then designers can feed that into how the assistant speaks and interacts.

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Social media newsfeed which is designed to show both sides of a story 

How might we design a newsfeed which presents a more balanced version of every story? Would presenting more information around a topic be helpful, or just add more noise?

– May 4, 2020 @1:53pm. Listening to Rabbit Hole podcast episode 3

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– August 24, 2019 @8:53pm. Spectrum street art installation by HUB studio in Montreal.

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Apply two different metaphors to the same game, and see if the change in language and context changes players game strategy

“Werewolf” is a fantastical version of the social deduction game “Mafia”. One employs the metaphor of villagers hunting down a werewolf, the other a mafiosi. It what ways would applying two different game languages change how people play the game? 

–  May 22, 2020 @12:36pm. Talking to friend about how her getting a covid antibody test was a little bit like the card game “Cabo”

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Virtual restaurant menu with every possible piece of data attached to it; forces the viewer to ask, what’s missing?

Virtual restaurant ordering has a lot to offer fast food customers – everything they need to know about their meal at their fingertips. Taking this notion to the extreme, if a machine is designed to maximize information to users and answer every question they have about their food, is there some kind of experience missing? What’s the qualitative value of humans in a restaurant experience?

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– May 1, 2019 @7:04pm. Thierry Mugler exhibition at Beaux-Arts, Montreal

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– July 10, 2019 @10:47pm. Montreal Completement Cirque, Montreal Circus Festival.

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Witnessing the death of custom large-scale type!

– October 31, 2019 @1:18pm. Visiting the museum of letters in Berlin

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Art exhibition which lets visitors experience five different Facebook newsfeeds on the same topic.

Our understanding of the world and events in it are largely shaped by our experiences online. Algorithms behind sites like Facebook and YouTube curate personalized content on our behalf, and so are responsible for creating alternative realities from one user to the next. Our newsfeeds form “echo-chambers”, reflecting back our already formed views about the world. The same issue viewed from a different user profile tells a wildly different story. 

I wonder what it’s like to be inside of another newsfeed, to be inside another person’s reality. What do they see when they search “climate change”, or “vaccinations” . Without that viewpoint, it’s hard to understand the extent to which these algorithms are effecting our worldviews. 

Spend a minute in someone else’s social media feed?

– March 2, 2020 @1:26pm. Work cafeteria, listing to Today Explained episode from Feb 28 - Make America Doubt Again

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Write an article on why sometimes suddenly it feels like bugs are crawling on your skin

Hypothesis: there is a direct correlation to the number of times you have this feeling and the number of times you have visited r/bedbugs

November 2017 - The time I thought I had bed bugs (I did not)

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Develop an app can answer the question “What should I wear tonight?” by suggesting an #ootd from user’s personal Instagram.

Using a machine learning model built from many fashion Instagrams, the algorithm takes as input user data, fashion style, date, time, etc and suggests the closest matching #ootd from past instagram posts. 

If users can find something within their existing wardrobe, or refresh an old loved item, they may not feel the need to go out and buy new clothing.

– February 7, 2020 @5PM. Thinking about conversation about recycling ones own wardrobe as a way to think about sustainable fashion.