dayoungl Looking Outwards – 10

Caroline Sinder’s Nudge Nudge

For this week’s Looking Outwards, we are focusing on women practitioners in the field of computational design. From a list given from the professor, I randomly selected an artist named Caroline Sinders. She introduced herself as many things but among them, I think how she described herself as a machine learning designer and a digital anthropologist was quite interesting. Looking through her website, I realized that a lot of the things she do and experiments with are things that are done frequently in CMU such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and merging of technology and design. Especially, I made a strong connection looking at one of her work “Nudge Nudge”, which is a wearable watch that doesn’t tell time but tells something in relation to time — Google Calendar Events. The idea itself was so clever to begin with. Her wearable tells time in relation to a meeting, class, or anything marked in the calendar and tells you how much time you have in between through variation of colour. Another thing that draw me in was her ideation process; it was very similar to what we do in research methods class as Design majors. She not only thought about the aesthetics and the delivery of the idea of changing colour but also about people’s response to the colour change through experimenting with putting stickers on participants and how distracted they felt when they were reminded of having stickers on their shirts; this experiment was done to measure the level of distraction people not wearing the Nudge would get when they are near an individual wearing Nudge. Little considerations like this revealed something I learned in class and through her post, I was able to see my learnings put into practice.