Before coming to Carnegie Mellon to pursue a course in interaction design, in my master’s at METU Dept. of Industrial Design, I’ve started to explore the answers to a question that I found very important in the context of “smart” physical products. While smartness is a subjective term, the question, “why does -smart- products have adoption problems among users?” made me discover many different problem spaces related with a variety of disciplines.

While doing a literature review for my open-ended evaluative user experience research at METU, I find one term, trust, being heavily related to smart products’ or in other…

I submitted this thesis proposal to our thesis coordinator originally in May 2017 and since that time, I’m constantly revising my research territory and questions. You will be able to find the latest revisions to my thesis proposal in the changelog section.

Thanks for stopping by!
If you are interested in contributing to my research, don’t hesitate to contact me from mericda@cmu.edu. I’m always interested in being distracted by learning about related works, research on human-machine trust. Nowadays, I’m exploring a lot on conversational interfaces, algorithmic experiences, and trust.

Changelog

v0.1 May 2017 — Submission without references

Abstract

Our lives are getting…

This article is a written form of my pecha-kucha presentation for our Interaction & Service Design Concepts: Principles, Perspectives & Practices 2016 class, which was run by Molly W Steenson at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design. You can also read the full paper.

“Hello, World!” is the first program that any coding beginner usually learns how to print it to the computer screen. The phrase signifies a birth of a machine that is just about like a kid with an extraordinary intelligence for its age. In this example, its parent, the user, asks the computer to display a phrase…

This article is a written as a full paper for our Interaction & Service Design Concepts: Principles, Perspectives & Practices 2016 class, which was run by Molly W Steenson at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design. You can also read the short version.

Hello, World!

“Hello, World!” is the first program that any programming language beginner usually learns how to print it to the computer screen[1]. The phrase signifies a birth of a machine that is just about like a kid with an extraordinary intelligence for its age. In this example, its parent, the user, asks the computer to display a phrase…

One of the challenging parts for presenting mixed reality concepts is the storytelling via visualizing proposed interaction scenarios. In Moment, we tackled this challenge by creating our own workflow for visualizing 3D MR UI as well as other media assets to be shown in our concept video. Although it is not perfect, I believe our workflow can be useful for other mixed reality designers, who want to show their concepts in their contexts, but lack of technical skills such as C# or working with Unity for Hololens app development. …

In addition to our hands-on research, we have also started to explore the existing research on our design territory. Our secondary research involves but not limited to academic research papers from the fields such as human-computer interaction, design, sociology, and geriatrics. We have been also following the latest trends, and best practices in the fields of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality through online resources such as tech news blogs, code repositories, and discussion platforms such as Twitter and Medium.

Prior to our exploratory research presentation, we have read the following academic papers:

Older adults’ perspectives on successful aging…

Along with out-of-college stakeholders, we also interviewed two professors at School of Design, who worked on the domain of Aging in Place. Our interviews with Bruce Hanington and Mark Baskinger provided us a mixture of academic/real-world insights, which sat between the fields of industrial design and psychology.

Interview at the Moon Room: Mark Baskinger

To get insights about how important is the tangibility important for the elderly, we interviewed Mark Baskinger, who is an associate professor at CMU School of Design with interest areas such as the language of designed artifacts, inclusive/universal design, visual “noise” in product design, tangible interaction, UX, and methodologies of visualization.

We started…

At first, everything was dumb. We, humans, created a world for ourselves on planet earth. We have interacted with our physical environment, have manipulated it, and we finally have transformed it…It is the version 2016 of our world and it is still continuing to develop. From the very beginning of the human existence to this date, our world has been artificial, it was man made. This week, I will talk about a term to explain how we are trying to create a world that thinks as same as us or even more than us in some ways: artificial intelligence.

Throughout…