About Me

Hi! I’m a researcher in human-computer interaction, interested in how the designed affordances of systems - technical and social - influence cognition and behavior. Selected projects include exploring the influence of AI on creativity, investigating the way games can change how players think about the real world, examining the effects of VR experiences on self-perception, and understanding the benefits of hands-on vs digital experiences.

For the past four years, I have been a user experience researcher at two of the largest technology companies in the world, focused on XR (AR/VR), interactive media, and improving the way insights are shared across disciplinary divides. During this time I also taught user experience research at the university level.

Before that, I completed a PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, exploring searching for interactive media (e.g. treating moments in a game like pages in a book) as a member of Adam Smith’s Design Reasoning Lab. Outcomes of my work in the lab included a series of interviews identifying user needs for videogame moment search, the largest corpus of interactive media for machine perception (755+ games) to date, and an explorable explanation of search-by-analogy.

Before I was a member of Design Reasoning Lab, I was part of the UCSC Cognitive Modeling Lab, the NASA Distributed Team Decision Making Team, and the Stanford Psychophysiology Lab.

Caricature by Talia Waltzer