Highlights from 2018–19
Sha Xin Wei, director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, spoke at the 2019 TedxASU event. In his talk he explored the transition in technology from “i-Tech” to “social tech” and now to “eco-tech.” He was also featured in SciArt magazine, where he discusses the transdisciplinary work at the school’s Synthesis Center and creating responsive environments inspired by living ecosystems to learn how to enrich but not complicate our environments.
Maureen van Dobben, Amy Rodriguez and Jordan Neel released an an educational mobile application one month after they all graduated with degrees in digital culture from the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. “Our mixed-reality project integrates augmented reality into the classroom to help young learners master fractions,” van Dobben said. “In this instance, augmented reality helps students understand complex abstract concepts by creating a connection between the numerical form of the fraction and what that number actually represents.” The team credits their success so far to opportunities ASU gave them to develop the app, including $3,000 in funding as part of making it to the final round in ASU Research Enterprise’s Virtual Reality Innovation Challenge. “We wanted to create this app because we all felt there are lots of interesting ways to use augmented reality in education specifically,” van Dobben said. “It’s a really interesting field that is still emerging.” The team, along with fellow digital culture alum Ryan Black, spent 2018-19 working on the app the called LeARn, and released it to the GooglePlay store in June.
Researchers from the School of Arts, Media and Engineering traveled abroad to share their work at several international conferences. In April, doctoral students Jennifer Weiler and Piyum Fernando and Assistant Professor Stacey Kuznetsov presented work they did as part of the school’s Social and Digital Systems transdisciplinary research collective at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing, the premier international conference of human-computer interaction, in Glasgow, Scotland. In February, faculty were invited to present work on creating rich responsive environments in the school’s Synthesis Center at the Living Architecture Systems Group Symposium in Toronto. Researchers in the Synthesis Center explore how these environments can be used for shelter, social exchange or play and how people experience computer-mediated environments that now include not only virtual reality games and experimental theater, but also classrooms, airports and public spaces.
Spring Digital Culture Showcase
April 26, 2019
“I hope that over the years, my education and the experience I’ve gathered here leads me into bigger, greater things.” – Lisette Borja
Lisette Borja, a senior studying digital cultural in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, was named the first recipient of the Ryan Matthew Duncan Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship was established in memory of the son of Cheryl Marston; she has worked as a business operations manager with what is now the School of Arts, Media and Engineering since its inception as a joint initiative of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering in 2004. Duncan, who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2011, was known to have a spirit of generosity, and the family thought it would be fitting to create this scholarship to support undergraduate students in the school’s digital culture program.
Numbers reflect 2018-19 and are accurate as of June 30, 2019.
