2019–2025 · Human-Computer Interaction, Management Sciences · Research
PhD, University of Waterloo
Thesis on designing interaction systems for constrained spaces, from vans to cockpits to card tables.
Outcome
Five refereed papers including CHI and Graphics Interface; fully funded on merit scholarships.
I went back to school at 30, after Amazon, because I wanted to understand the gap between how products are designed and how people live with them. My thesis, “Towards Design of Interaction Systems for Constrained Spaces”, looks at what happens when technology built for large, stable environments ends up in small, moving, improvised ones.
The field work started with the #vanlife community (CHI 2021), moved through a phenomenological study of placemaking in small spaces (Graphics Interface 2024), and ended with a physical artefact, the Proteus card deck, that became Scramble. Along the way I taught nine courses in UX and HCI to about 700 students across three programmes.
Supervised by Mark Hancock. Funded by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, QEII-GSST, and the President’s Graduate Scholarship.