HCII 30
Chronicling 30 years of academic research with tactile and digital artifacts to gamify research discovery for a broader audience
Timeline
3 Months
Summer 2024
Role
Sole Visual Designer
Student Researcher
Tools
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Indesign
With
Dan Saffer (Faculty Advisor)
3 Student Researchers
Project Context
Showcasing academic research with one cohesive experience that is engaging for all audiences
The Human-Computer Interaction Insitutue at CMU works on more than just mobile interfaces or websites, with imaginative projects like room-scale smart-walls (Wall++, 2018) or a playful snack-delivery robot (Snackbot, 2009).
How might we showcase the 30 years HCII research in a way that engages the general public, expert academics, and everyone in between in a way that is fun yet accessible? How do we highlight research projects and faculty work without oversimplifying their content?
My Role
Visual identity & defining deliverables
As the sole visual designer, I created the project visual identity and all project visual assets, from print to web.
With the team, I helped with researching 200+ HCII faculty papers, defining project deliverables, and writing content for the flashcards.
54 Card Flashcard Set
Each card highlights the big idea and key takeaways of an impactful HCII faculty research project, with a QR code linking to the full paper for further exploration.
Flashcard Box
Informative yet playful packaging for the entire flashcard set.
Celebrating the breadth of HCII
8 card categories: New Interactions, Design Research, Education Technology, Robotics, Social Computing, AI, Accessibility & Ethics, Safety & Privacy.
Research  
Gathering and summarizing 250+ notable research papers and projects from 30 years of HCII Research
With 3 other student researchers, we started out by gathering, reading, and summarizing over 250 papers that were either recommended by faculty, award-winning, most cited, or most downloaded. Each person read and summarized ~80 papers, and we realized the full breath of research we were tasked to honor and represent.
Card Design 
Creating responsive card components for easy filling of card content and ideation
Since I was tasked to design the cards before we had finish writing our text, I created a custom component system that would be responsive to any text added, allowing me to easily iterate the cards and eventually fill in the text very quickly.
Web Experience Design 
Connecting to a web experience that incentivizes users to delve deeper and learn more
Each physical card leads to the associated research paper, and our entire set connects to the interactive web experience with corresponding digital cards where users can not only look into the paper, but also view related video and project content. This experience is designed to engage general audiences with a fun interface while ensuring that academic users have easy access to in-depth information.