My sincere thanks to Provost Ferguson, Professors, Crown College Graduates, Parents and Staff for having me here today.

Congratulations to the 2014 Crown College graduating class. This is a great day for you. To parents and families of the graduating class — congratulations to you!

I’m sincerely grateful to have the honor to speak to you today. I consider myself a distant cousin to UC Santa Cruz, even though I was born in NY, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University, my husband, brother-in-law and sister-in-law are all UCSC alums.

There’s a 90% chance, or 50/50 probability, you’ll witness a range of emotions from me today. Excitement, nervousness, hope, possibly sadness, anger — depending on how you respond to my talk…

I want you all to take a real good look at me. I’m 5’3’’. My face is asymmetrical, I have a chicken pocks scar on it and other marks from a life lived.

I am a technologist. I am not a computer.

I would never have been designed by a machine. And neither could you have been. Yet.

We are, currently and for the most part, as a species, human through and through. And isn’t that wonderful.

My work is weird. It also does not fit neatly into categories — it aims to make the real world more engaging sometimes via technology and often through play.

This includes projects like a walking tour of Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv led by a Palestinian Blogger and Mom, a game for a city that address socio-economic segregation through social mechanics and real world local currencies. These things don’t necessarily fit neatly into categories or boxes.

On a project designed to keep plants alive in a public space, we needed to create a system to teach people how to do it, so we created a networked sensor that enabled plants to talk to each other and the people around them in order to express their needs with personalities based on their botanical habits and characteristics.

Some of these projects made lots of money — I worked on the game Cityville a few years back, and some were for public safety for governments, museums or television networks.

Much of this work has earned attention not just because it employed bleeding edge technology to invent new kinds of play & participation, but because much of the work attempts to impact attitudinal or behavior change — which has all kinds of ethical complexity. Ethical complexity sometimes can be used as a fancy stand-in term for the old “good, evil, or practical” debate… which I won’t debate today.

Lewis Mumford said, “The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises. It is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises”. However, at the same time, to paraphrase the French philosopher Lyotard, he said “the end goal of us as fleshy humans is to put our brains into unknown types of machines that can survive deep space and deep time, so we can send ourselves, or that version of ourselves, out of the solar system before the sun blows up.”

You, are growing up in a machine age.

And given that Crown College is a school uniquely focused on science and ethical issues in emerging technologies, Mumford’s point is critical. Our humanity, fleshy weirdness and psychological complexity is something machines cannot create without us. Without you creating that.

There are all kinds of ways to address the notion of ethics in your life and work. For me, creating design & development constraints to address this is one way to make it a priority, I teach classes & lead prototyping groups that explore these themes of persuasive technology and designing the human.

But, we’re not just our work, and just as your identity is not limited to a “recent graduate of UCSC’s Crown College” as awesome as that is. I also happen to be a mom, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an aunt, a wife, a human. Ethical issues of emerging technologies weave their way through all aspects of our lives.

Especially today and moving forward we don’t have good understandings of the impacts of the new modes of interaction and data collection that are now a reality.

Wearables, sensors, heads up displays, FICO scores, natural language processing, memristors…

As I’m sure you know, this stuff impacts you as a student, as a child, as a parent, a consumer, a citizen, a voter, a job candidate, an employee, a friend, and a partner, even before the NSA gets involved.

Which is to say there are a myriad of opportunities for you, with your expertise, curiosity, fear and optimism to examine and invent in that space too!

No factory, no machine or line of code can truly replicate a human — we can fool people; but it is our humanity, emotion, ability to keep promises and to relate on a deep level, to understand the implications with empathy that differentiates us.

But, let’s not get too serious. Much of my work has involved play. Play is great because it’s free, separate from real life and creates order — it provides a magic circle or sandbox. One in which we’re permitted to fail, behave differently than we could in everyday live, collaborate, compete, role play and experience systems from the inside out.

My years in undergrad and grad school, provided the same kind of a magic circle or sandbox. I imagine that your years here at UCSC have provided your own sandbox — that has accelerated your learning, play, connections, and collaborations.

My mentor, Red Burns, who founded both the Alternate Media Center and ITP, a graduate program in technology at NYU provoked her incoming students with the following. And I dare you to bring the following with you today as you leave the college sandbox and step into the open seas of the sometimes banal and sometimes thrilling and challenging life as a graduate.

> Resist your comfort zone

> Talk to people, listen, observe, absorb

> And know that human beings are ambiguous, uncertain, and imperfect — these are hard things to integrate with organizations’ preferences for efficiency, clarity, certainty and perfection. Do your best.

I wish that each day is magic for you. And if it doesn’t feel like it turn it around. It might be tomorrow or it could be when you’re 40 or the day after something great happens and you don’t know what to do next. Be open minded about your own complex, non-linear dynamic experiences, as well as scientific understanding and analyses.

I want to end on a Dr. Seuss quote that my 3 year old daughter shouts from time to time: “I am I, and I do not know why, but I know that I like it. You are you, say it loud and say it proud, I am I.”

Do good work and be kind.

Thank you and congratulations to the Crown College Class of 2014.