Conrad

Albrecht-Buehler

My dissertation research examined how users monitor complex systems and complex environments. Heed is the framework that I developed to communicate the importance of attending to a situation.

In order to monitor situations, and test the Heed framework, I created the Gizmometer interface. The interface was successfully deployed in four distinct application arenas, some of which are still in active use today.

Individual document file icons are typically no more informative than a three character filetype extension. The semanticons project improved a user's recall of a file by automatically creating a unique icon based on the file name, its folder location, and its content.

Monitoring streams of text, like news feeds, is difficult without a significant amount of attention. By utilizing motion to highlight changing stream content, and using proximity to convey related-ness, the TextPool interface was an early streaming text monitoring interface that encouraged awareness with low user attention

Human-Centered Product Design is an undergraduate course I helped to create and still teach, which focuses on ensuring that products meet the needs of their users. The course introduces observational methods, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, user testing, business models, and the social, marketing, and engineering concerns that impinge upon products.

CrayonQuake is a custom renderer for the NPRQuake engine. The renderer gives the game the appearance of having been colored by a child. The work was intended to juxtapose the violent nature of the game with an innocent childhood activity.

A research project in which my partner and I explored merging the product design process with the assistive technology design process. We worked to create an example of a more appealing device that served to mitigate an impairment brought on by stroke.

A simple, automatic updater for the Processing.org programming environment.

An ongoing experiment utilizing Twitter as a group communication platform to learn and understand the needs of mobile, remote workers.

My "Schoolyard iMac" won first place in a design competition held at Apple Computer for its interns.

I created the first prototypes of this distributed, parallel runtime environment. The system in its current incarnation is vastly improved from my early work, but still retains some of the architecture that I designed. I include it here because it constituted a significant amount of work in my early career.

For Apple Computer, I designed and submitted for patent a method of interaction to control the pairing of wireless devices. Additional detail are restricted by NDA.