"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
- Mark Twain
Graduate research projects:
The social uses of personal photographs
-
June 2004-present
- Morgan Ames. The Social Life of Snapshots: The Past, Present, and Future of Personal Photography. Master's thesis, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Filed May 4, 2006.
- Morgan Ames & Lilia Manguy. PhotoArcs: A Tool for Creating and Sharing Photo-Narratives. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2006, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press, April 2006.
- Nancy A. Van House, Marc Davis, Morgan Ames, Megan Finn, & Vijay Viswanathan. The Uses of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2005, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press, April 2005.
- Nancy A. Van House, Marc Davis, Yuri Takhteyev, Morgan Ames, & Megan Finn. The Social Uses of Personal Photography: Methods for Projecting Future Imaging Applications. 2004.
SIMS, UC Berkeley
The goal of this study is to understand the social uses of personal photography as an aid both to understanding how people use and will use emerging digital imaging technology and to designing image-related technology that supports people’s actual practices. A secondary goal is to develop and refine methods for understanding the uses of – and resistance to – emerging technologies, based in social science methods and understandings, particularly STS.
Publications for the social uses of personal photographs (since I joined the group):
[top]
The Technology and Poverty project: Valuing service and serving values for the economically disadvantaged
-
June-December 2004
- Brian Yang, Morgan Ames, and Matthew Kam. Designing Technologies for Underserved Communities: Contextual Interviews at a Job Training Agency.
- Poster presented at Grace Hopper Conference, October 2004
In collaboration with Stanford D-school, Digital Vision Fellows, and Ricoh Innovations
We want to use technology to empower economically disadvantaged communities in the United States and beyond. We are studying the way people in poverty interact with social service and governmental organizations in order to understand their needs and hypothesize what systems could assist them in their goals. We have found that several important factors empower people in poverty, including becoming part of a community and helping others. We are continuing our investigation and prototyping systems for social service organizations in the U.S., with a plan to expand our design to Bangladesh.
Publications and presentations for Technology and Poverty:
[top]
Summer 2004 reading groups
Undergraduate research projects:
The True Costs of Technology
-
September-December 2003
At UC Berkeley
My final paper, focusing specifically on Columbite-tantalite production, is a first step in bringing more political and economic awareness to engineering efforts. Technologies such as computers and cellular telephones have dropped drastically in price in the last ten years, and technologists herald the dawn of an age when computing devices can be manufactured so cheaply that they can be embedded in objects from wallets to wallpaper. These price drops are often attributed to improvements in manufacturing efficiency, but this is only part of the reason that technologies are so low-cost. More importantly, cheap technologies often rely on the continuing exploitation of the third-world countries that provide most of the raw materials, and the companies that extract raw materials from third-world countries often do so without regards to social or environmental costs. I hope that raw material sources will become publicly available and will be factored into design considerations, and that exploitation is recognized as one of the reasons for the falling prices of technology.
Email me (use the email at the bottom of the page) if you're interested in seeing my final paper or hearing more about this project.
Remote Usability Methods
-
June-October 2003
- Morgan Ames, A.J. Brush, Janet Davis. Comparing Synchronous Remote and Local Usability Studies for an Expert Interface. Proceedings of Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, October 2004.
- A.J. Brush, Morgan Ames, Janet Davis. A Comparison of Synchronous Remote and Local Usability Studies for an Expert Interface. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2004, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1179-1182. ACM Press, April 2004.
- Morgan Ames. Final report on remote usability studies. CRA-W Distributed Mentor Project.
Under the Distributed Mentor Project, with the UrbanSim group at the University of Washington
Though remote usability studies are common enough in the field, little published research has been done to explore how their results compare to local usability studies. In particular, the efficacy of synchronous remote usability studies for expert interfaces - in terms of comfort, trust, and usability errors found - has not been verified. In this project, we will investigate whether remote usability studies can acheive the same results as local studies, and if not, what is lost and why.
Publications and presentations for Remote Usability Methods:
Healthy Cities Ambient Displays
-
June 2002-June 2003
- Morgan Ames, Chinmayi Bettadapur, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer Mankoff. Healthy Cities ambient displays. In Extended Abstracts of UbiComp 2003, Conference on Ubiquitous Computing.
- Poster for Intel research day, 4/25/03
- Presentation slides for Intel research day, 4/25/03
- Feb. 9, 2003 status report: description, interview quotes, design ideas
- Feb. 2, 2003 status report: results of survey
- Poster for the Berkeley Engineering fall 2002 undergraduate poster session
Under the CRA CREW, Intel Undergraduate Research, and David Scholar programs at UC Berkeley
The healthy cities ambient display project strives to make residents' conceptions of the health of their city more visible and concrete. First, we gathered information from residents of Berkeley about what indicators figure most prominently in determining the health of a city - green space, diversity, equity, local shops, safety, pollution, cars, pedestrians, public events, resource use, etc. This information will spawn a family of ambient displays, spanning neighborhoods and decades, to be installed around Berkeley. These will hopefully serve as a tool for awareness and social change, as well as a test-bed for the design of public displays and for ambient display evaluation techniques.
Publications and presentations for Healthy Cities:
Evaluation techniques for Ambient Displays
-
September 2001-September 2002
- Jennifer Mankoff, Anind K. Dey, Gary Hsieh, Julie Kientz, Scott Lederer, Morgan Ames. Heuristic evaluation of ambient displays. In Proceedings of CHI 2003, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 169-176. ACM Press, April 2003.
- Morgan Ames, Anind K. Dey. Description of design dimensions and evaluation for Ambient Displays. Berkeley Technical Report, September 2002.
- Ambient Displays summary for CRA-W DMAP
- my Ambient swiki page
At UC Berkeley
Ambient Displays are ubiquitous computing devices - often embedded in interesting artistic objects or everyday artifacts - that provide a constant stream of peripheral information. Windows are natural ambient displays: they give information about time, weather, season, and other events, yet they're pleasing. Footprints or paths are also natural ambient displays.
Groups at MIT Media Lab, PLAY Institute, Georgia Tech, and elsewhere have been building ambient displays as art installations, but few groups have evaluated their creations as computer science artifacts. The Ambient Displays group at Berkeley is adding the evaluation cycle to our ambient display design cycle, noting the challenges that arise with evaluating this new class of devices.
Publications for evaluation of ambient displays:
Conferences attended (most recent first):
- CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
April 2006, Montreal, Quebec- Late-breaking results paper published
- Student Volunteer
- 4S Conference
October 2005, Pasadena, CA - BlogHer Conference
July 2005, Santa Clara, CA - CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
April 2005, Portland, Oregon- Late-breaking results paper published
- Student Volunteer
- Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
October 2004, Chicago, Illinois - CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
April 2004, Vienna, Austria- Late-breaking results paper published
- Student Volunteer
- Ubicomp (Conference on Ubiquitous Computing)
October 2003, Seattle, WA - Usability Professionals Association conference
June 2003, Phoenix, AZ- Remote Usability workshop participant
- CHI (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
April 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, FL - Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
October 2002, Vancouver, B.C.