Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-82). / Pintail is a mobile companion application for guided storytelling. To inspire and augment story creation, Pintail uses priming as a technique by showing the user what others feel or have drawn about the places s/he is visiting. These Pintail prompts are synthesized from online travel reviews and doodle books. Some prompts are displayed in an ambient manner on a second screen. Users can use the Pintail story-creation tools to remix, reflect and create their own stories. The stories created by Pintail have an analog form. They are printed on a re-purposed mobile receipt printer. They are designed to catalyze in person-conversations. Pintail tries to balance between the story creation activity and the actual travel experience. Pintail provides the users with the structure and tools for storytelling that are aware of the short attention span of today's audience. / by Sujoy Kumar Chowdhury. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 107-110). / This thesis uses mixed methods and datasets to explore how political news is perceived and shared within and across party lines in the context of the 2016 US presidential elections. We begin by examining the impact of political context versus article content on the reader through a crowdsourced study, and follow up with a large scale analysis of story sharing on the social platform Twitter to find cases where popularity transcends political affiliation. In Part One, we look at reader reactions. We investigate the question of trust in political news by performing a study online. We look at the impact of content features (reading level of the article) versus context clues (media brands) to find that political affiliation and brand outweigh all other aspects. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on reader actions. In particular, we look at how political news stories from the same time period are shared on the social media platform Twitter. As we found party loyalty and media brand perceptions to be significant influences on the reader's opinion of news, we are especially interested in examining emotional features that cause stories to become popular beyond political boundaries. Together, these two parts hope to form a more complete view of factors affecting and driving readers in an election cycle that is heavily influenced by media coverage, both traditional and new. / by Sophie Beiying Chou. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-155). / Building on the understanding of music and architecture as creators of spatial experience, this thesis presents a novel way of unfolding music's spatial qualities in the physical world. Spaces That Perform Themselves exposes an innovative response to the current relationship between sound and space: where we build static spaces to contain dynamic sounds. What if we change the static parameter of the spaces and start building dynamic spaces to contain dynamic sounds? A multi-sensory kinetic architectural system is built in order to augment our sonic perception through a cross-modal spatial choreography that combines sound, movement, light, color, and vibration. By breaking down boundaries between music and architecture, possibilities of a new typology that morphs responsively with a musical piece can be explored. As a result, spatial and musical composition can exist as one synchronous entity. This project seeks to contribute a novel perspective on leveraging technology, design, science, and art to provide a setting to enrich and augment the way we relate with the built environment. The objective is to enhance our perception and challenge models of thinking by presenting a post-humanistic phenomenological encounter of the world. / by Nicole L'Huillier. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 46-49). / High precision voltage measurement has become a hidden part of our daily lives. Our phones, our wearables, and even our household appliances now include precision measurement capability that rivals what was once only available in laboratory grade test equipment. Converters with 6 digits of resolution and nanovolt noise floors cost less than a dollar and fit into our watches. In contrast, measurement of fast phenomena remains out of our daily reach, as it requires equipment too expensive and too unwieldy to be found outside the hands of specialists. Commoditization of sub-nanosecond measurement would improve our ability to process the information from spectral sensors, which in turn would impact portable medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and the healthy maintenance of the infrastructure we rely on. Here a novel measurement architecture is presented that enables cost effective measurement of these sub-nanosecond phenomena, and is easily integrated into existing digital processes. It is built on the same founding premises that the sigma delta architecture uses to dominate low cost precision measurement: 1) Precise measurement with imprecise components 2) Digital logic replacements for analog components 3) Trade time for accuracy A prototype unit constructed from existing digital communication components is shown to achieve 11 equivalent bits of resolution at 3GHz of analog bandwidth, with repeatability better than 1 millivolt and 3 picoseconds. Timing uncertainty is shown to be better than 1 picosecond. Several use cases are presented: Differential dielectric spectroscopy, LIDAR, and USB 3 SuperSpeed channel sounding. / by Eric VanWyk. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 87-92). / In this era of luxurious information, we are free to access as many news stories as we want. However, news is so abundant that people don't have the time to consume all of it, nor the time to select which stories they want to know about. We trust editors and algorithms to decide for us, giving away our control and sometimes missing the big picture. For computers, news stories are usually not annotated or categorized, they come in as an unstructured text that for machines is hard to generalize. While numerous tools exist that use Natural Language Processing to identify features of news articles, few use NLP to help readers navigate the universe of news stories. This thesis proposes a novel interaction method, coupling principles of data visualization and user experience with an interactive machine learning approach to ease our understanding and exploration of mass information while collecting nuanced annotations for the same information. We present a human machine collaboration where the computer analyzes and renders the data, making it easier for the reader to explore. The user in turn gives annotated labels that help the computer better analyze the next data points. As a proof of concept, we present Panorama, an interface for open, transparent and collaborative exploration of news. Panorama addresses information overload, by allowing users to filter, organize and control their news feed. Panorama is also an interactive machine learning system. As the user reads and explores the news that were analyzed by machine learning models, she is encouraged to submit feedback that is sent back to these underlying models, helping them improve. This work explores the relationship between knowledge and design. It demonstrates how data visualization and interfaces help humans understand, build, control and improve a system based on machine intelligence. / by Yasmine Rubinovitz. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 87-93). / In this thesis, I propose aqueous droplets as a form of programmable material that can computationally transform its physical properties. Liquid matter can undergo physical transformation through interfacial forces and surface tension. I introduce a system called DropletIO to regulate interfacial forces through a programmable electric field. The system can actuate and sense macro-scale (micro-liter to milli-liter) droplets on arbitrary planar and curved surfaces. The system can precisely move, merge, split, and change shape of droplets and thus enables a range of applications with human interactivity, information displays, parallelized programmable chemistry and dynamically tunable optics. DropletIO system uses electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) to manipulate droplets. EWOD is a physical phenomenon where a polar droplet on a dielectric surface is attracted to a charged electrode. I constructed EWOD arrays with integrated actuation and sensing on inexpensive printed circuit boards that can scale to arbitrarily large areas and different form factors. Additionally, in this thesis I discuss how semiconductor device scaling applies to electrowetting for smaller volume droplets and hence miniaturized programmable lab-on-a-chip. Droplet based microfluidics is extensively used in biology and chemistry. In this thesis I describe two novel fluid manipulation mechanism for microfluidics. First, I show an approach for splitting aqueous droplets on an open digital microfluidic platform and thus a system capable of performing a complete set of microfluidic operations on an open surface. Second, I demonstrate how electrowetting platforms can handle large volume fluids, and hence enable a new direction in programmable fluid handling called digital millifluidics. / by Udayan Umapathi. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 112-118). / Two projects in scientific data sonification are presented. 'Quantizer' is a platform that enables composers to develop artistic sonification schemes using real-time data from the ATLAS detector at CERN. Three sample audio streams are available for real-time consumption by the public and the public engagement potential for the project is studied. 'Rotator' uses sonification as a practical tool for analysis of high dimensional data Users can swipe data between their auditory and visual channels in order to best perceive the structure of a dataset. A dual audio-visual presentation mode is found to be a promising alternative to use of a purely visual display mode. / by Juliana Mae Cherston. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-62). / In this thesis, we present a non-invasive and non-intrusive system that enables silent duplex human-machine communication and enables an interface that is internal to the user. We present a peripheral nerve-computer interface, AlterEgo, that allows a user to silently converse with a computing device without any voice or any discernible movements - thereby enabling the user to communicate with devices, AI assistants, applications or other people in a silent, concealed and seamless manner. A user's volitional internally articulated speech is characterized by efferent signal signatures in internal speech articulators that are captured and recognized by the proposed system. The hope is to facilitate a natural language user interface, where users can silently communicate in natural language and receive information and sensory input aurally through bone conduction. This enables a discreet, closed-loop interface with a computing device, and thus providing a seamless form of cognitive augmentation. The goal of the thesis is to describe the architecture, design, implementation and operation of the entire system along with demonstrating the utility of the platform as a personal computing system. / by Arnav Kapur. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 131-136). / Over the past ten years the ability of institutions and businesses to capture, aggregate, and process an individual's data has grown significantly as digital technology has increasingly integrated into our daily lives. In the urban informatics context and in computational social science, projects use data collected about our behavior in the urban environment to solve problems including traffic congestion and public safety, the creation of targeted advertising, and the development of entire neighborhoods. Some projects using aggregate data may ultimately benefit individuals by making improvements to their environment at large. Although individuals are the source of aggregate information, an individual citizen often does not directly engage with the data collected about them. The research contained in this dissertation explores a series of visualization experiments concerning direct engagement between citizens and public datasets such as the U.S.Census. In order for such visualizations to be effective, they not only have to efficiently communicate data, but must also be intuitive, evocative, and utilize narratives presented from the user's perspective. In this dissertation I address the question: How can we design visualizations which inform daily interaction between individuals and public data about their environment? To answer this question, the dissertation introduces 4 sets of maps: (1) the Powers Map and Scopes Map contextualizes Census data(American Community Survey) by invoking changes in scale, (2) the Sightline Map and Cross Section Map use a person's physical experiences to orient Census data, (3) the Filtered Satellite Maps give qualitative comparisons of conditions described by Census tables, and (4) the Personal History Map leverages an individual's geospatial history to filter Census data. These 4 map groups share the goal of allowing us, as individuals, to use public data to design our own experiences within our environments and to make use of public data directly on our own behalf. / by Jia Zhang. / Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-159). / Much of what we design today is mediated by digital processes, from digital tools and software used to create tangible and virtual artifacts, to online resources and communities that enable people to exchange design knowledge. Encapsulating information about how we design into shared digital formats introduces opportunities for democratized education, where people contribute to and use shared digital resources to support their learning. In this dissertation, I introduce a style of design documentation called make-throughs in which people construct personal narratives of their design process, enabling new opportunities for capturing effort, connecting with other like-minded creators, and reflecting on process. I analyze make-through documentation in the context of two platforms I created: Build in Progress and Spin. Build in Progress is a web-based platform for visualizing how design projects are developed, while Spin is a photography turntable system for creating animations of design projects over time. Through these platforms, I investigate the following questions regarding capturing and sharing design process: (1) How can tools be designed to motivate and support the creation of process-oriented documentation?, and (2) What role can make-through documentation play in enabling reflective practice? Through an analysis of shared documentation created using both platforms, interviews with select users, and observations of spaces utilizing the tools, I reveal opportunities for integrating documentation into design practice and re-thinking documenting as an expressive and creative activity. I show how make-throughs support a range of motivations for sharing process, and based on these insights, I provide a set of design principles for learning environments, physical and virtual, championing documentation as a tool for learners to communicate their growth as makers. / by Tiffany Tseng. / Ph. D.