Adventures in HCI

If you know me, you know I love a good challenge and the recent HCI assignment was just that. The Assignment: create a chat bot for Slack that attempts a task that requires a human connection. Choosing the task was probably the easiest part. Professor Li provided some examples, such as teaching the user Bayes rule, or counseling someone that is struggling emotionally, but one example really caught my eye: debate a contentious topic. What sounds more fun than making a bot that can argue with its users? Whatever you answered, it's probably true, but that's debatable (get it?...cuz we're making a debate bot, haha). Bad jokes aside, making a debate bot is super relevant and the contentious topics are plentiful, all thanks to today's divisive political climate. From abortion's pro-life/pro-choice debate to debates about trans* bathroom use, there is a plethora of options for us to choose from. One that has been reignited recently with his debut as a Nike sponsor

Oxy's wonderful Computer Science and Cognitive Science Professor, Justin Li, presented his students with the task of redesigning the website of an organization (on- or off-campus) as a mobile app. I am one of those students, and, let me tell you, this was one of the most engaged I have ever been in a project. Let me tell you how I did it. As soon as we got the assignment, I immediately thought about the poorly designed website that the Occidental College Dance Productions Club uses as its main platform. The main points of tension for me was their application of drop-down menus, what they decided to put in them, and what content was on the page. Sometimes it made sense, and other times, not so much. One of the aspects I had already pushed them to change was to put the "Dance Drop Form" under their existing "Contact Us" tab rather than the "Get Involved" tab. "Get Involved" doesn't necessarily indicate "Drop Dance" or "I

As a busy college student-athlete, I want to be able to read interesting and relevant articles without having to spend the time to go searching for them. I am interested in staying up to date with news, but I also want to read things about design and productivity and . Many news sources have larger sections that may contain articles about these passions, but they're often hard to find. In comes Flipboard to the rescue.                          After making an account, I told Flipboard my interests and it compiled sectioned magazine type tabs with the most recent and relevant articles from many different sources. I didn't have to personally go to each site it was pulling from and subscribe to some newsletter. Even better, I didn't have to go searching for them in the first place. Amazing. I can even be more specific about what subsections I am interested in. For example, under Productivity, I was able to tell Flipboard that I only wanted to see articles about tim