University of Oregon Ford Alumni Center

A picture is worth 1000 words. Great visuals can enhance, dramatize and even bend the narrative. From historical photos to modern-day digital images made of millions of pixels, images have always been instrumental in shaping our visual understanding of the world around us. As much as they have been instrumental in shaping reality, easy access to image manipulation has also resulted in widespread misinformation. When we can fake anything, honest representation of reality in images has become a complex problem to crack.

When developing SquareTalk, our goal was to explore ways that we could use tacit technologies to foster a sense of connectedness between strangers at large-scale festival events.

Tax is a give-and-take system that binds our society together as humans by providing infrastructures and services that we all rely on. However, tax touchpoints are often designed for the system rather than the user – the processes and traceability around tax, as well as how it contributes to our shared spaces and society can often feel complex, opaque, or invisible to the individual. Could we reimagine our relationship with it? And how might our connected environments offer new ways for us to interact with them?

With the service provider Good-Loop, newspaper readers can connect to content moderators to help them slow down the rapid spread of online dis-/misinformation. The fake news in its present form has evolved and become more challenging to identify: Synthetic dis-/misinformation is treated the same as all other internet content, showing up in search results & social media. Without the infrastructure in place, content moderators will find it hard to distinguish between real and A.I. manipulated audio files, texts, images, & videos.

Expressive Wearable explores clothing as a communication tool. This project imagines a scenario in which clothing expresses the wearer’s attitude directly without the concern of adhering to social conventions.

Solo female travel is absolutely booming! But despite the growing interest, many women still lack the confidence in their abilities to take and enjoy a trip alone; citing concerns of safety, navigation, and social isolation as what’s holding them back.

Nike+ was an experiment that revolutionized sport. With its launch seven years ago, we started a journey with Nike that has taken them from a company that manufactures shoes and apparel, to a company that makes products and services.Nike+ tapped into a community of runners with an existing behavior. Elite runners use the Nike+ platform to track their runs. We created a functional platform for athletes who wanted to understand their performance and improve on it. But even though Nike+ was a phenomenon for athletes worldwide, it wasn't optimizing its audience.We saw a greater opportunity in bringing performance tracking to the masses. But the question was: How do we bring Nike+ to a larger audience? How do we get people to adopt a new behavior?In order to bring Nike+ to the masses, we didn't just launch a new productwe transformed the way people measure performance by introducing a new metric called Nike Fuel. For the first time, the Nike+ FuelBand lets anyone who's active to compare themselves with anyone else.

Before the late-1990s, dial-up was the standard way of connecting to the Internet. Accessing the Internet was a conscious action that involved negotiation between family members living in the same house. The nostalgic dial-up modem sound of Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch… was the bridge between the analogue and the digital. Today, we are living in a world where the Internet and connected devices have become ubiquitous. The excitement around connecting to websites has disappeared and the underlying mechanism of the internet is hidden.

DODU is an AR-based multimodal interactive literacy teaching aid for Chinese children aged 3-7 with dyslexia, which calls children's senses such as sight, hearing, touch and movement through Augmented Reality and multimodal interaction, so as to achieve effective and interesting literacy training effects.

Sharks are majestic creatures that have, unfortunately, received a bad reputation. The Shark Sense VR exhibit was designed to challenge visitors to aquariums to see the world from a shark’s perspective and discover just how incredible these animals are. Based on the principles of experiential learning – the understanding that we are all able to better grasp concepts, and learn and retain information when we experience things firsthand – the experience is designed as an immersive virtual reality game.