Research Portfolio

Greg Walsh

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Executive Summary

In my academic career, I have been deeply involved in studying participatory design and its role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The passion I have for these methods is due to my belief that the best way to solve problems is to enable the affected groups to work directly with those that can craft a solution. As part of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s intergenerational design team, Kidsteam, I have had the chance to participate in design research of children’s technologies with children through a mixed-methods approach. Broadly, my research is focused on both the design process and products of co-design with children.

My work style is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature as my co-authors have been from information studies, computer science, and education, as well as from industry and cultural institutions. I have taken on different roles in research teams from leading to supporting, and have consulted to other research groups about co-design.

I have had the opportunity to work on research projects covering a wide range of topics while still focusing on co-design. As part of Kidsteam, I’ve worked with top-tier partners in the design and development of new children’s technologies such as Nickelodeon, Carnegie Hall, and the National Park Service. The techniques that I have developed and refined have been used in the design of technologies that affect hundreds of thousands of children.

After seeing international projects not reach their full potential because of limitations in methods and techniques to enable participants in geographically distributed areas, I turned my attention to researching how to make distributed co-design easier and more efficient for design partners. My dissertation work includes developing a distributed co-design process as well as identifying those technologies which enable distributed co-design through computer-supported tools. I successfully led a distributed co-design group in the summer of 2011 that included children and adults located around the world. Our two main projects were the design of a game to help young children to learn to read and a recycling bin that posts to social networks in order to encourage sustainable activities in the home.

For my future work, I want to continue researching and developing tools that give a voice to children in the design process of children’s technologies. Initially, I plan to create a hybrid distributed/co-located intergenerational design team to create new technologies for children including the use of natural language processing to augment the design process. I also plan to investigate how the technologies and processes for distributed co-design can be applied to co-located, intergenerational co-design and will continue with my research on creating new design techniques.

Distributed Co-Design

Doc Consortium Paper
Distributed Co-Design

Children who are not co-located with system developers because of geographic location or time zone difference have ideas that are just as important and valid as children who are easily “available”. This problem is the motivation for my thesis work. I propose to design, develop, and research a computer-mediated, geographically distributed, asynchronous tool to facilitate intergenerational participatory design.

Integrative Paper
Developing DisCo

This paper reports on the prototype design of DisCo, a computer-based design tool that facilitates distributed co-design through Layered Elaboration. Layered Elaboration is a co-design technique that, until now, has relied on paper and clear transparencies to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact. The new computer-based system allows co-designers to work asynchronously while being geographically distributed. DisCo contains tools that allow the designers to iterate, annotate, and communicate from within the tool.

SUBMITTED TO THE COLLEGE OF INFORMATION STUDIES DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN FULFILLMENT OF THE INTEGRATIVE PAPER REQUIREMENT FOR ADMISSION TO CANDIDACY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

Co-Design Techniques

Layered Elaboration
ACM Digital Library Link

As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on "Layered Elaboration," a co-design technique created to support these evolving needs. .Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team, including adults and children ages 7 -- 11 years old, used the technique to design both a game about history and a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation.

Applying and Modifying Existing Co-Design Techniques for Use with Older Adults

In this project, I worked Bo Xie and the Electronic Health Information for Lifelong Learners (eHILL) group at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and Tom Yeh from the computer science department at the University of Maryland. We worked with older adults on the design of an e-learning tool called the Online Tutorial Overlay Presenter (OnTOP). OnTOP presents contextual help for users of health informatic systems. I led two of the seven design sessions that focused on using modified versions of our co-design techniques. The designs were incorporated into a version of Sikuli.

Go Big Co-Design

This is a new variation on an old technique. Instead of using art supplies, Kidsteam used large cardboard boxes in the design of a new interactive experience for the US National Park Service. The team built a shipwreck out of the boxes and then used extremely large Sticky Notes to augment and critique the design. The scale of the prototype gave the designers a unique perspective on the environment and how other children could interact with it. Note: Mona Leigh Guha, Beth Foss, Jason Yip, and Beth Bonsignore were all instrumental in the design of this modified technique.

Employing Co-Design in the Video Game Design Process

Innovative and engaging video games can be created if the target audience is included in the design process. Co-design is the process of working with your intended audience as colleagues in the design of technology. Co-design requires techniques that bring together designers in a way to create new technologies. New design techniques are developed to be used in real-world situations, but, require refinement through their own use. Video games offer technique designers an abundant source of material to design and refine techniques in real-world scenarios. This chapter will discuss co-design, and the use of co-design techniques in the design of a serious video game to explore history, to help children be more environmentally minded, and a virtual world that reinforces positive social behavior.

To appear in Handbook of Research on Serious Games as Educational, Business, and Research Tools. Ed. by M. M. Cruz-Cunha. To be published in 2012.

Serious Games

Energy House *Top 10 at Cooney Center STEM Video Game Challenge*

Co-Design for Instructional Video Games

Extended Abstract

This project originated as a paper for a Doctoral Seminar class and represents my research interest at the intersection of games and co-design. It was accepted to CHI 2009 as a work-in-progress. I am proud of this project because I was able to lead a design session at Kidsteam, synthesize the observations, and publish the results in an international forum.

Social Networks and Learning

Social Networks as a Vehicle to Foster Cross-Cultural Awareness
Walsh, Brown, & Druin

The growth of online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In has transformed the way in which individuals establish and maintain relationships for both business and entertainment. In this paper we present the analysis of a similar online social network that was used to foster cross-cultural awareness among users ages 14-17. The social network provided students across the globe with an environment to establish online identities, explore their own culture and the culture of peers who were located in three different countries. We make recommendations to network designers to reconsider friendship metaphors, work within existing network tools, and replace text as the default medium in communication.

In Press in the Proceedings of the Interaction, Design, and Children Conference, 2011

Twooter: Designing a Musical Expression Tool for use in Social Networks
Joshi & Walsh

This paper reports on the design of Twooter, a tool for non-verbal, music-based expression in an online social network. Borrowing ideas from popular social networks and influenced through recent educational endeavors by a large cultural institution, Twooter is being designed with the hope of bridging the gap between the ease of updating one’s status in a profile and the difficulty in content creation. Twooter is being designed through the Cooperative Inquiry method. Adults and children are working together to design this technology for use in an online, educational environment. Several design sessions have informed researchers on the features and interactions required to accomplish this goal.

In Proceedings of the Interaction, Design, and Children Conference, 2011

Technical Skills

I have been developing interactive technologies for over 14 years. Since I began, I have used toolkits like Authorware, Macromedia Director, RealBasic, iShell, and have even built my own in Java. My academic career has brought me to the conclusion that Open Source software is the way to go for developing prototypes and research-based tools. Because of this, I have embraced using HTML5 as my platform of choice in order to develop interactive tools and have tried to avoid commercial and platform specific tools when possible.

User-Interface Development Tools

HTML5 (JavaScript + CSS + AJAX) - Extensively used in project work. Prefered over Flash.

Adobe Flash/ActionScript/Flex - Heavily used for dissertation and professional projects. Although I don't like it to use it anymore, 14 years of experience is hard to ignore.

Back End

PHP - The glue that I use to keep my research applications going.

MySQL - The database that I use for storage. Although it has become less popular than other, newer tools, I still prefer it.