Recent News – DaraghByrne.me

Daragh Byrne Associate Teaching Professor
School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University. Core faculty for MSCD and PhD CD.
Courtesy appointments in the School of Design and the Human Computer Interaction Institute.
Afflilated facilty with the IDeATe network, Block Center for Technology and Society, and CyLab.
Co-Lead of the TRACES Lab. Co-founder and platform lead for a2ru's Ground Works.
Pronunciation: Dah-rah (silent ‘gh’) · Pronouns: he/him. · Google Scholar · ResearchGate · ORCID 0000-0001-7193-006X.

Recent News

Co-Leading 'Creativity, Empathy and AI: A National Summit on The Human-AI Creative Partnership' this week in D.C.

On April 11 & 12 in Washington, DC, Virginia Tech, along with Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, and a2ru, will gather those at the forefront of leveraging technology for creative generation.

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Guest Lecture on 'Imagining Consequences' for Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture"(48383)

This Tuesday, I’m giving a guest lecture in Valentina Vavasis School of Architecture course “Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture” entitled ‘Imagining Consequences: Speculative Ethics for IoTs and AIs’

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Co-leading 'Advancing Creative Physical Computing Education' workshop at DIS 2024, Copenhagen

Marti Louw, Sarah Sterman, Cesar Torres, Noura Howell, Kayla DesPortes and I will lead Advancing Creative Physical Computing Education: Designing, Sharing, and Taxonomizing Instructional Interventions, a workshop at DIS 2024 in Copenhagen this July!

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'Zines for Unmaking' accepted to Sustainable Unmaking Workshop @ CHI24

“Zines for Unmaking: Designerly Frames to Dismantle eWaste’s Sociotechnical Realities” accepted to the CHI 2024 hybrid workshop on Sustainable Unmaking: Designing for Biodegradation, Decay, and Disassembly on Saturday, May 11, 2024

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Poster accepted to ISLS 2023 exploring student values of creative documentation

‘Exploring Students Interpretations and Values of Documentation in Creative Learning Domains’ co-authored with Yinmiao Li, Xiaoyang Zhou, Ricky Chen, Daniel Klug, and Marti Louw will appear at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS 2023)

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Guest Lecture on 'Speculative Ethics for IoTs and AIs' in CMU's Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture course (48383)

This Tuesday and Thursday, I’m giving a guest lecture in Valentina Vavasis’s School of Architecture course “Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture” entitled ‘Imagining Consequences: Speculative Ethics for IoTs and AIs’

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Received MFI Grant for 'Mixed reality In-situ Welding'

Dina El-Zanfaly (School of Design) and I have been awarded a grant from the MFI entitled “Mixed reality In-situ Welding: Integrating AR, tinyML and generative AI to train skilled workers for future opportunities in creative arts and manufacturing” The project will collaborate with the Industrial Arts Workshop.

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CELJ Best Special Issue Award won by “Vibrant Ecologies of Research,” the first special issue of Ground Works

Winner: “Vibrant Ecologies of Research,” the first special issue of Ground Works

The number and quality of submissions for the 2022 CELJ Best Special Issue Award was truly impressive, making adjudication both delightful and difficult. We were inspired by the range of topics and approaches. In making our decision, we considered the clarity of editorial vision, the significance of contribution, whether or not an issue was conceptually interesting beyond a single field, formal and methodological innovation, and evidence of collaborative engagement across individual contributions to the broader project of the issue.

The award review committee found “Vibrant Ecologies of Research,” the first special issue of Ground Works, remarkable among a strong field of contenders. Ground Works is a relatively new online open-access journal that publishes peer-reviewed media-rich articles on research projects at the intersection of the arts and other fields. This special issue makes clear the importance of providing a generative space for work that does not fit in traditional disciplinary journals or galleries. The overall thematic concept and the ways in which it was presented was innovative and insightful. Comprised of five peer-reviewed projects and three invited commentaries, the special issue presents an ‘ecological’ approach to understanding the nuanced interconnections of interdisciplinary research and practice, and the exciting scholarly possibilities of arts-integration. The committee was particularly taken with the interactive and dynamic aspects of the special issue, creative use of visual artifacts, and strong collection of individual articles and commentary.

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PhD student Sanaz Saadatifar's paper accepted to ASHRAE 2023 winter conference

PhD student Sanaz Saadatifar’s paper entitled ‘Balancing Thermal Comfort with Energy Consumption in Building HVAC Management: Piloting a Combination of Digital Twins, IoT Sensors and Real Time Dashboard to Inform Occupant Decision Making’ has been accepted to ASHRAE 2023 winter conference.

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Invited talk in the School of Design Graduate Colloquium

Giving an invited talk on some of my recent work to the Graduate Design Colloquium (51-703) in the School of Design at CMU

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Spooky Technology receives best pictorial at DIS 2022

Spooky Tech – co-authored with Dan Lockton and our student collaborators – was awarded best pictorial at ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2022. The abstract is below.

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Ground Works team awarded ACLS Digital Justice grant

Veronica Stanich, a2ru Research Programs Manager and the Managing Editor of our online journal Ground Works, has been awarded a 2022 ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant alongside collaborators Daragh Byrne and Elizabeth McClain.

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Demo on Helper Intelligences for Non-Verbal Sound will appear at ACM Creativity and Cognition 2022

Zhenfang Chen, Dina EL-Zanfaly and myself will present a demonstration entitled ‘Google Home, Listen: Building Helper Intelligences for Non-Verbal Sound’ at Creativity and Cognition ‘22

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2 contributions accepted to ACM DIS 2022

One pictorial ‘Spooky Technology: The ethereal and otherworldly as a resource for design’ and one full paper ‘“Slurp” Revisited: Using ‘system re-presencing’ to look back on, encounter, and design with the history of spatial interactivity and locative media.’ will appear at DIS 2022 this summer.

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Guest Lecture on 'Imagining Consequences' for Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture"(48383) -

This Monday, I’m giving a guest lecture in Valentina Vavasis School of Architecture course “Ethics and Decision Making in Architecture” entitled ‘Imagining Consequences: Speculative Ethics for IoTs and AIs’

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Ground Works Receives CELJ Honorable Mention for Best New Journal

The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) has awarded Ground Works an Honorable Mention for Best New Journal in 2021. CELJ announced the award at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention. The award cites Ground Works as offering “…the professional credentials of peer-review to truly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work, with a submission process that honors non-textual knowledge.” Read more about the award.

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'Creativity, design and instruction for hybrid environments' forthcoming workshop at ACM C&C 2022

‘Here and there, now and then: Creativity, design and instruction for hybrid environments’ a proposed workshop for ACM Creativity and Cognition has been accepted and will take place on June 20th in Venice, Italy. More info below and website forthcoming.

Hybrid Environments—spaces where physical and digital elements are blended in-situ—have been growing and expanding over the past few decades. As these technologies become woven into our everyday lives, new challenges and opportunities emerge as they transform our experiences in our homes, workplace, museums, and cities. Designing hybrid environments requires training in both design of physical environments and interactive technologies. Cross-trained students in higher education need to be able to creatively respond and adapt to these emerging landscapes. Students must bridge fundamental knowledge in design, architecture, art, interactivity, and computation. This is a complex pedagogical practice. How are educators meeting this emergent need? The workshop’s primary goals are to (i) form a collective understanding of the current technology and pedagogical challenges to teaching the design and understanding of hybrid environments; (ii) bring together educators and practitioners interested in the future of hybrid environments, (iii) discuss creativity support tools as well as, frameworks, methods, and approaches for teaching emerging technologies, (iv) form a multidisciplinary community to shape the future of pedagogical inquiry and implementation to hybrid environments.

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Column in CACM now available: 'Is a privacy crisis experienced, a privacy crisis avoided?'

Michael Skirpan, Maggie Oates, Daragh Byrne, Robert Cunningham, and Lorrie Faith Cranor. 2022. Is a privacy crisis experienced, a privacy crisis avoided? Commun. ACM 65, 3 (March 2022), 26–29. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3512325

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Guest Lecture in HyperSense (51361) - Augmenting Human Experience in Environments

This Monday, I’m giving a guest lecture in Dina Zanfaly’s School of Design course “hyperSense: Augmenting human experience in environments”

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Coordinating 'Design, Creativity and AI mixer' at CMU

On Friday the 18th, gathering faculty from across the campus at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for the first Design, Creativity and AI mixer at Carnegie Mellon.

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Guest spot in M.Arch Pre Thesis (48644)

Joining M.Arch Pre Thesis on 1st of Feb to discuss research through design and design-led research in graduate theses.

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Guest lecture in 'AI, Society, and Humanity (94878)'

On Tuesday 25th of January, I’m giving a guest talk on Spooky Technology in ‘AI, Society, and Humanity’

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Spooky Technology: Book Launch Party on Friday, October 29, 2021

On Friday afternoon, October 29, 2021, professor Daragh Byrne (CMU School of Architecture), professor Dan Lockton (ex CMU School of Design; Eindhoven U. of Tech.) and their students present a book launch party for Spooky Technology—a book about the ghosts in our machines. Join us at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (CFA-111) on Friday 10/29, 4:30pm, for spooky potions and snacks! RSVP here.

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Get a copy: Spooky Technology is now available to download and buy

Spooky Technology is now available for anyone to download or buy.

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Presenting in HCII Seminar Series

On Friday, I’ll be presenting in CMU’s Human Computer Interaction Institute Fall Seminar Series

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Received courtesy appointment with CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute

Accepted an invitation to a courtesy appointment with the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).

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MakerCards and the SDL Evidence Kit to be presented at the CIRCLS’21 Convening

We’ll be presenting “Two Cases of Documentation for Learning: MakerCards and the SDL Evidence Kit” at the CIRCLS’21 (Sept 13 & 14) Roundtable and Gallery Walk Session

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presenting at play.make.learn on Aug 5: 'Exploring Documentation for Learning'

“Exploring Documentation for Learning” will be presented at the 2021 Play Make Learn Conference on Thursday, August 5 from 11:00am - 12:00pm Central Time

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'Four CoDesign Cases of Documentation for Learning ' will be presented at Connected Learning 2021

Marti Louw, Daragh Byrne, Robert Zacharias, Amy Keller, Linda Conlon, Peter Wardrip and Talia Stol will present ‘Four CoDesign Cases of Documentation for Learning’ at the Connected Learning Symposium 2021 on July 9th

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NSF Smart Maker at Remake Learning Days

The NSF Smart Maker Project will host two virtual events as part of Remake Learning Days 2021 on Friday 14th of May.

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MakerCards Work in Progress paper accepted to IDC 2021

Initial outcomes from “MakerCards: An Electronic Component Discovery Tool to Support Remote Physical Computing Education” will appear at the Interaction Design for Children 20201 conference. This work is part of our NSF on Smart Maker Spaces and describes preliminary outcomes from a study on the Makercards support for remote and hybrid teaching. The paper is co-authored by Miranda Luong, Daragh Byrne, and Marti Louw

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Two contributions to appear at Creativity and Cognition 2021.

These are a pictorial on student documentation practices and a short paper on spectrality as a resource for designing mixed-reality soundscapes.

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Short paper 'SneezeLove: Embodying Cultural Superstitions in Connected Devices' to appear at DIS 2021

Malika Khurana, Zhenfang Chen, Daragh Byrne, Yang Bai. ‘SneezeLove: Embodying Cultural Superstitions in Connected Devices’. In Proc. Designing Interactive Systems 2021. June 28-July 2, 2021, Virtual Event

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Selected as 2021-2022 CMU Inclusive Teaching Fellow

Along with other CMU faculty, I’ll join the 2021-2022 Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows (PITF) program. This program aims to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in CMU courses. Fellows participate in a year-long Faculty Special Interest Group and collaborate with Eberly Center consultants to (re)design a CMU course. I’ll be working on my fall courses ‘Connected Communities’ and ‘Designing for the Internet of Things’ as part of the program. For more see: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/inclusiveteaching/index.html

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Spooky Tech hosts Haunted Machines

On Thursday April 8th, Natalie Kane and Tobias Revel of Haunted Machines joined Responsive Mobile Environments to speak about their work.

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CFA Grant development award

Along with five other colleagues in the College of Fine Arts, I have been selected to participate in the Grant Development Award program this summer.

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Guest Talk in School of Design Graduate Colloquium

On Friday Nov 6, I gave an invited lecture to the School of Design Master and PhD students as part of the ‘Graduate Design Colloquium (51-703)’

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Spooky Technology receives grant from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Arts @ the Frontier

Spooky Technology a collaborative project with Dan Lockton receives a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Arts @ the Frontier grant.

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Ground Works publishes three new articles

In 2020, Ground Works – an open access online journal that supports research-based, interdisciplinary collaborations through rigorously peer-reviewed presentation of arts-inclusive work – opened up a call to the a2ru network for submissions. After careful review of numerous submissions, three works were selected for inclusion in the journal and published ahead of the a2ru national conference.

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"Multimodal Word Sense Disambiguation in Creative Practice" to appear in IEEE ICMLA 2020

Manuel Rodriguez Ladron De Guevara’s (School of Architecture Phd Student) work will appear as a forthcoming paper entitled ‘Multimodal Word Sense Disambiguation in Creative Practice’ at IEEE ICMLA 2020

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TouchWood Labs compete at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield

TouchWood, a IoT project developed by Matthew Dworman as part of my course “IoT Advanced” took to the stage to pitch their product as part of Startup Battlefield at Techcrunch Disrupt.

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Guest lecture for HyperSense

This Thursday, I gave a guest lecture in Dina Zanfaly’s School of Design course “hyperSense: Augmenting human experience in environments”

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Mergereality featured in Issue XXVII.5 of Interactions Magazine

“Mergereality” by Shengzhi Wu, Daragh Byne, Molly Wright Steenson appears in the Demo Hour in the current edition of Interactions Magazine.

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'Tsuga Convictio' to appear at IEEE VISAP 2020

Manuel Rodriguez Ladron De Guevara’s (School of Architecture PhD student) work will appear as a forthcoming paper entitled ‘Multimodal Word Sense Disambiguation in Creative Practice’ at ICMLA 2020 - 19th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications

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Participated in World Economic Forum Global IoT Council Workshop

As part of Launching a Global Action Plan, the World Economic Forum’s Global IoT Council has coordinated a series of workshops on key issues for IoT. I took part in the ‘Awareness and Understanding’ event co-hosted by CMU.

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Short paper by MSCD graduate Erik Ulberg on 'Hand-Crafting Neural Networks for Art-Making' will appear at ICCC'20

Erik Ulberg, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Daragh Byrne. ‘Hand-Crafting Neural Networks for Art-Making’. In Proc. Eleventh International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC’20) September 7 – 11, 2020, Coimbra, Portugal.

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Joining Groundworks' (remote) Advisory Board 2020 meeting

This Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll be (remotely) joining a2ru’s Advisory Board meeting for Groundworks

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Late breaking paper to appear at HCI International 2020

A paper entitled “Tools with Histories: Exploring NFC-tagging to support hybrid documentation practices and knowledge discovery in makerspaces” reporting on preliminary explorations of hybrid documentation strategies in educationally-focused makerspaces will appear in the proceedings of HCI International 2020 as late breaking work.

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Spookte.ch launches

Spooky Tech hopes to survey cases for a digital inventory of spooky technologies. Over the next ten weeks, twelve students from across CMU will compile, curate and organize these examples. We’re gathering these examples as we work at spookte.ch and an inaugural blog post can be found at http://spookyte.ch/blog/ with more to come from our rapporteurs.

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Offering 'Spooky Technology' a summer remote project course at CMU

Co-teaching a new project course this summer with Dan Lockton, School of Design entitled “Spooky Technology.” Students will work to identify, gather and prepare richly annotated cases for inclusion in a digital inventory of spooky technologies The outcomes of the course will be a virtual ‘book sprint’ where students prepare an online and print inventory of that can be widely shared with interested audiences.

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Pictorial on 'Cultivating material knowledge' forthcoming at DIS 2020

Pictorial entitled “Cultivating material knowledge: Experiments with a low cost interface for 3D texture scanning” will appear with MSCD graduate Wei Wei Chi at DIS 2020.

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Invited Talk at PDMA Pittsburgh

Presented a remote guest lecture for the PDMA Pittsburgh programs on the internet of things.

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IJAC article forthcoming

Article entitled “Multi-resolution in architecture as design driver for additive manufacturing applications” by PhD student Manuel Rodriguez Ladron De Guevara, has been accepted to International Journal of Architectural Computing.

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Spooky Tech receives CFA Fund for Creativity and Research award

Working with Dan Lockton in the School of Design, we were awarded $4,950 for a collaborative proposal titled “Spooky Technology.” This award is from the College of Fine Art’s Fund for Research & Creativity

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Demo on AR Gestural Interaction to appear in CHI 2020 interactivity

“Megereality”: Leveraging Physical Affordances for Multi-Device Gestural Interaction in Augmented Reality” was co-authored with Shengzhi Wu (lead, graduate MDes 2019) and Molly Wright Steenson (Associate Professor, School of Design.)

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Participating in World Economic Forum (WEF) Workshop on IoT Governance

Invited to participate in the CMU/World Economic Forum (WEF) Workshop on IoT Governance (held on Feb 6) to inform the WEF’s Global State of IoT Report. This was convened of a range of experts from CMU, and the Pittsburgh area to provide feedback on the preliminary findings of the report and develop a briefing on the Global State of IoT Governance.

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Webinar on Groundworks

An a2ru Webinar on Groundworks took place on Friday, January 31, 2020, 2-3pm. It included Veronica Stanich, Managing Director of Ground Works, Daragh Byrne, Technical Director of Ground Works, and Shannon Fitzsimons Moen, Associate Director at a2ru.

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'Project Amelia provides a visit to the not-so-distant future'

CyLab article interviews Mike Skirpan on immersive theater experience, Project Amelia, and discusses the research effort around the performance.

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Ground Works launches at a2ru national conference

The Ground Works platform formally launched at the a2ru 2019 national conference. Ground Works is a peer-reviewed online platform for interdisciplinary, arts-focused research. a2ru’s Ground Works is a compendium of exemplary arts-integrative research projects, and a hub for reflection on the processes that drive such work. A prototype edition based in the a2ru national conference knowledges is now available. We are also seeking submissions for inclusion as exemplars in Ground Works, with the initial Call for Proposals prioritizing projects in 2020 that include participation from a2ru partner universities. We look forward to growing the platform beyond the network in subsequent issues.

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Joined Discussion on Industry 4.0 at PDMA Pittsburgh

Set to a panel discussion “Product Development and the Digital Thread…Are we ready for Industry 4.0?” at Digital Bridge 2019, Pittsburgh’s Industry 4.0 Conference, hosted by Catalyst Connection. Other panelist’s include Dr Joseph Cuiffi (Penn State New Kensington), Mike Holtkamp (Siemens Corporation), Sergio Butkewitsch Choze (Arconic) and Matthew Jones (AW Miller/Miller 3D). The panel is moderated by Stephen Leonard (GrayMatterz).

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Presenting at MakerEd Convening 2019

The 5th Annual Maker Educator Convening will be held October 12-13, 2019 at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. As part of the convening, we’ll present recent outcomes from the NSF Smart Maker project and walk participants through our co-design frameworks in a one hour fifteen minute workshop.

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Guest lecture in IDeATe' Learning Media Design

Giving a guest lecture today on the ‘Maker Movement and Critique’ as part of Marti Louw’s Learning Media Design (05-291), a course offered through CMU’s IDeATe undergraduate minor.

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Speculations on the future of AI and human experience; student work featured in Bricolage’s immersive theatre Project Amelia.

Student work from Responsive Mobile Environments will debut in upcoming immersive theatre Project Amelia. The production invites ‘you to the R&D lab of Aura, one of the world’s most innovative tech giants, to participate in the launch of a groundbreaking intelligence product like no other.’ Students designed the “Museum of Failures” as interactive props and speculative devices as a back-catalog of Aura’s product line. The show opens on September 20th.

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Courtesy appointment in School of Design

Accepted an invitation to a courtesy appointment with the School of Design

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Promoted to Associate Teaching Professor

I’ve been reappointed and effective July 1st will be promoted to Associate Teaching Professor in the School of Architecture.

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Guest lecture in HCI for Product Manager

Gave a guest lecture entitled ‘UX for Conversation’ to ‘Special Topics in HCI: HCI for Product Managers’ (05-898) class led by Dr. Laura Dabbish, Human Computer Interaction Institute, at Carnegie Mellon University

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UPLift Projects featured on CMU.edu

Our CMU Experience Task Force’s committee announced five new temporary infrastructure projects to improve campus life.

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CMU Leaders Make Trek To National Maker Faire

“The White House today recognized CMU for its leadership of the MakeSchools Alliance, launched in fall 2014 with support from Bucknell, Case Western Reserve and Cornell universities. Forty-eight member institutions share best practices for deploying maker-based education or “makerspaces” on their campuses.”

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RME featured on CMU.edu

Students in my course, IDeATe’s Responsive Mobile Environments, effort to create an inflatable martian greenhouse was featured in this article.

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White House Official Announces Launch of Higher Education Alliance for Maker Education

Carnegie Mellon Develops Online Platform To Showcase Best Practices for Making Across America’s Colleges and Universities. MakeSchools.org is a project directed by Daragh Byrne, Intel Special Faculty for Physical Computing, Responsive Environments and Emerging Media with CMU’s School of Architecture and IDeATe Network. Today, the online platform details nearly 50 higher education institutions’ initiatives, programs and collaborations.

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Higher Education Institutions Respond to the President’s Call to Support Making on College Campuses

“Higher education institutions are responding to the President’s call to action to support Making on college campuses. One recent effort responding to this call is the Make Schools Alliance, a new initiative that will provide students with spaces, projects and mentors to engage in hands-on Making activities and boost their interest and persistence in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).”

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