Building civic pride and engagement are essential for cities to thrive. This semester, teams of Creative Technology and Design (CTD) master’s students developed proposals in coordination with the City of Denver aiming to do just that.

The CTD program engages students in pursuing practical solutions to real-world design challenges by blending behavioral insights, technology, branding and marketing, and physical objects. This comprehensive approach can yield more meaningful outcomes than one-off fixes are often able to achieve.

Indeed, while CTD students pursue unique paths focusing on creative industries, social impact or performance technology, they also work on cross-disciplinary team projects that push their boundaries and prepare them to succeed in careers across many industries.

Many methods to design
This year’s cohort had the opportunity to collaborate with the City of Denver to propose solutions for two initiatives as part of Design Methods, a foundational class all CTD students complete.

By nature, good design has no one right approach. Design Methods, taught by Derek Friday and John Breznicky, familiarizes students with many different ways to address design prompts, including the concepts of deliberate observation (e.g. cultural probes, ethnography); “problem finding” and “design thinking”; “wicked problems”; iterative design; and alternative generation and assessment.

The class culminates with month-long final projects in which teams collaborate on proposals to  address real-life design needs. This semester, four teams of CTD master’s students worked on projects in partnership with the Denver Mayor’s Office to develop solutions to support two remarkable initiatives.

They delivered final presentations in ATLAS’s B2 Black Box Experimental Studio. In attendance were representatives from the City of Denver, including First Lady Johnston, and Tran Nguyen-Wills, Deputy Outreach Director, along with Josh Wills, Creative Director & Partner at Consume & Create. Each team’s members brought a variety of skills, talents and interests to their groups and collectively they proposed a series of multidisciplinary solutions.

Friday noted, “[The teams] were able to generate solid ideas based on the brief and using the process that we taught them during the semester with the caveat that [the process of] developing your own method for problem solving continues to evolve throughout your entire creative process… They were pros and we were really, really proud.”

Here is some of what the teams presented:

Little Saigon / Saigon Azteca

• Team 1 - Abena Gyimah, Julia McKeag, Harsita Rajendren, Shreya Pradeep Sekar, Justin Chan, Lavan Kumar Baskaran, Mythiresh Gajendra Babu
• Team 2 - Sylvia Robles, Colin Egge, Jax Whitham, Jacy Ashford, Ayesha Rawal, Noah Reardon
• Team 3 - Scott Ehrlich, Eli Skelly, Clayton Hester, Shraddha Shinde, Nick Barcalow, Arjun Ramachandran

is a vibrant cultural enclave known for its rich Vietnamese heritage and community dating back over 40 years, as well as a growing Hispanic community. The City of Denver has identified opportunities to enhance cultural preservation, spark economic development and engage the community in this district.

City designers presented this strategy: “Exploring the intersectionality of the AAPI and Latino/Indigenous cultures, including music, dance, and ceremonies, will result in a compelling brand that amplifies the rich heritage of the communities that call this Cultural District home.”

Three teams proposed comprehensive design solutions incorporating branding (logos, color palettes, typography) and digital solutions (web and mobile integrations) along with physical interventions ranging from modular planters to signage to walkability improvements.

In lieu of an ornamental archway over a busy thoroughfare to mark the neighborhood, one team proposed a pedestrian bridge incorporating cultural design elements, with the aim to improve accessibility and safety. This combination of aesthetic enhancement and cultural relevance combined with practical, human-scale problem-solving powered by technology exemplifies what makes the CTD program special.

Josh Will, who developed the project briefs the students worked from, noted in his feedback to one team, “Given the community’s curb appeal—or lack thereof—it’s a very vibrant district and community, and you have done a great job of taking everything that exists on the inside. When you go into a restaurant or any of the businesses, the community is very welcoming and energetic, uplifting, bright and vibrant. And throughout your entire visualization and also the physical planters and archways—you’ve taken what exists inside and brought it outside.”

Give5 Mile High
Team: Aaron Neyer, Elizabeth Saunders, Pavan Dayal, Shawn Duncan Jr., Stephanie Babb

is a citywide volunteer initiative led by First Lady of Denver Courtney Johnston and the Mayor’s Office outreach team. This program empowers Denverites to come together to strengthen the community through collective service.

The City of Denver’s design team identified two key needs to ensure Give5 Mile High success:

• A technology solution to support and connect volunteers, organizations and local businesses.
• A marketing campaign to raise awareness among key stakeholders.

The student team presented a detailed mock-up of a mobile app designed to simplify connectivity and improve participation in Give5 Mile High. They also built a comprehensive brand and marketing strategy incorporating social media and local influencers to boost program awareness and engagement.

In her feedback to the team, First Lady Johnston said, “This is exactly what we were hoping [the team] would achieve. It made sense to think this should be a very user-friendly app that invites people to participate, and you all did it. This is incredible. I love that there are lots of things we didn’t even think about that you can do.”

Mayor Johnston was able to view the presentation remotely and added, “What I love about it is that it fundamentally understands and accelerates the two major principles of the project. One—how to make it so much easier for folks to sign up—the ease of sign-up is so powerful that the app makes possible. The second is the idea that the service is an act of community building. It is a way in which you serve with other people that binds you together, and this seamlessly connects you to other people.”

Additional project presentations
Aside from the work with the City of Denver, two more student teams presented projects combining engineering, design, data and art. Take a look:

Climate Threads
Team: Sara Runkel, Robyn Marowitz, Caitlin Littlejohn, Kate Rooney

Climate Threads aims to raise awareness about air quality and its impact on public health. Through data visualization and textile design, invisible disparities in air quality become visible and tangible. Explore the data on the .

Confluence
Team: Abe Homer, Shalimar Alvarado Cruz Hebbeler, Abhinav Mehrotra, Alexander LaFontaine, Cambria Klinger

Confluence is an interactive, immersive experience that explores the artistry of water. The dynamic fluid simulation can be interacted with by tilting a cairn on all four axes. Laser-cut and built using chipboard, the cairn represents the confluence of both the digital and physical world. The installation was completed with the use of projection, spatial audio, and soft ambient lighting for a peaceful and immersive experience. Learn more on the .

Designing through radical creativity and inclusion
Gordon Müller-Seitz, guest researcher and Chair of Strategy, Innovation and Cooperation at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) in Germany, provided students support and guidance throughout the semester. In addressing attendees, he summed up the ATLAS program by saying, “I really appreciated that you live up to your motto that you strive for radical creativity. But it is not only radical creativity—it is also this radical inclusiveness.”

Learn more about the Creative Technology and Design master’s program

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ATLAS is well-represented at this year’s conference convening at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from July 10-14, 2023. This year’s theme is resilience. 

"Resilience is at once about flexibility, durability, and strength as well as a sense of mutuality and hope where solidaristic modes of engagement make new kinds of worlds possible. 

This also recognizes that resilience takes many forms in design discourse, ranging across: indigenous knowledge, more-than-human perspectives, and the relationship between human, material and artificial intelligences."

It is exciting to see members across more than half of ATLAS labs represented in this year’s proceedings, with broad-reaching research covering microbiomes as materials for interactive design; 3D printing with spent coffee grounds; personal informatics systems; improving cross-disciplinary collaboration among artists and researchers; expressive movement for altering emotions and awareness; and the intersection of crocheting and data. Take a look:

Fiona Bell (ATLAS PhD alum), Michelle Ramsahoye (ATLAS affiliate PhD student), Joshua Coffie (ATLAS MS alum), Julia Tung (ATLAS BS student), and Mirela Alistar (ATLAS Living Matter Lab director, assistant professor)

Our bodies are home to an unseen ecosystem of microbes that live in symbiosis with us. In this work, we extend the “human” in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to include these microbes. Specifically, we explore the skin microbiome as an intimate material for interaction design. Viewing the body as a microbial interface, we start by presenting a method to grow our microbiome such that it becomes visible to the human eye. We then present a design space that explores how different environmental parameters, such as temperature and growth media, can be controlled to influence the color of the microbiome. We further investigate how our interactions in a daily uncontrolled environment (e.g., exercising, hugging, typing) can impact the microbiome. We demonstrate several wearable applications that reveal and control the microbiome. Lastly, we address the challenges and opportunities of working with the microbiome as an intimate, living material for interaction design.

Michael L. Rivera (ATLAS Utility Research Lab Director, assistant professor), S. Sandra Bae (ATLAS PhD student)

The widespread adoption of 3D printers exacerbates existing environmental challenges as these machines increase energy consumption, waste output, and the use of plastics. Material choice for 3D printing is tightly connected to these challenges, and as such researchers and designers are exploring sustainable alternatives. Building on these efforts, this work explores using spent coffee grounds as a sustainable material for prototyping with 3D printing. This material, in addition to being compostable and recyclable, can be easily made and printed at home. We describe the material in detail, including the process of making it from readily available ingredients, its material characteristics and its printing parameters. We then explore how it can support sustainable prototyping practices as well as HCI applications. In reflecting on our design process, we discuss challenges and opportunities for the HCI community to support sustainable prototyping and personal fabrication. We conclude with a set of design considerations for others to weigh when exploring sustainable materials for 3D printing and prototyping.

For additional details, see our article on how this and other Utility Research Lab projects won awards at the Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival.

Michael Jeffrey Daniel Hoefer, Stephen Voida, (ATLAS affiliate assistant professor, founding faculty, information science)

A grand challenge for computing is to better understand fundamental human needs and their satisfaction. In this work, we design a personal informatics technology probe that scaffolds reflection on how time-use satisfies Max-Neef's fundamental needs of being, having, doing, and interacting via self-aspects, relationships and organizations, activities, and environments. Through a combination of a think-aloud study (N=10) and a week-long in situ deployment (N=7), participants used the probe to complete self- aspect elicitation and Day Reconstruction Method tasks. Participants then interacted with network visualizations of their daily lives, and discovered insights about their lives. During the study, we collected a dataset of 662 activities annotated with need satisfaction ratings. Despite challenges in operationalizing a theory of need through direct elicitation from individuals, personal informatics systems show potential as a participatory and individually meaningful approach for understanding need satisfaction in everyday life.

Ruhan Yang (ATLAS PhD student), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab director, faculty member)

This paper explores the implementation of embedded magnets to enhance paper-based interactions. The integration of magnets in paper-based interactions simplifies the fabrication process, making it more accessible for building soft robotics systems. We discuss various interaction patterns achievable through this approach and highlight their potential applications.

[Workshop]
Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab director, assistant professor), Leah Buechley, Noura Howell, Jennifer Jacobs, Hsin-Liu (Cindy) Kao, Martin Murer, Daniela Rosner, Nica Ross, Robert Soden, Jared Tso, Clement Zheng (ATLAS PhD alum)

While cross-disciplinary collaboration has long been, and continues to be a cornerstone of inventive work in interactive design, the infrastructures of academia, as well as barriers to participation imposed by our professional organizations, make collaboration for some groups harder than others. In this workshop, we’ll focus specifically on how artists residencies are addressing (or not) the challenges that artists, craftspeople, and/or independent designers face when collaborating with researchers affiliated with DIS. While focusing on the question “what is mutual benefit”, this workshop seeks to combine the perspectives of artists as well as researchers collaborating with artists (through residencies or otherwise) to (1) reflect on benefits or deficiencies in what we are currently doing and (2) generate resources for our community to effectively structure and evaluate our methods of collaboration with artists. Our hope is to provide recognition of and pathways for equitable inclusion of artists as a first step towards broader infrastructural change. 

Refer to the for more details on this research. 

 

[Demo]
Ruojia Sun (ATLAS PhD student), Althea Vail Wallop (ATLAS MS student), Grace Leslie (ATLAS Brain Music Lab director, assistant professor), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab director, faculty member)

Movement forms the basis of our thoughts, emotions, and ways of being in the world. Informed by somaesthetics, we design for "taking up space" (e.g. encouraging expansive body movements), which may in turn alter our emotional experience. We demonstrate SoniSpace, an expressive movement interaction experience that uses movement sonification and visualization to encourage users to take up space with their body. We use a first-person design approach to embed qualities of awareness, exploration, and comfort into the sound and visual design to promote authentic and enjoyable movement expression regardless of prior movement experience. Preliminary results from 20 user experiences with the system show that users felt more comfortable with taking up space and with movement in general following the interaction. We discuss our findings about designing for somatically-focused movement interactions and directions for future work.

[Demo]
Mikhaila Friske (ATLAS affiliate PhD student)

This demo focuses around crocheting and data. In addition to a physical workbook for conference goers to peruse and try, there will be a few small set-ups for specific activities and a small craft circle for people to craft within if they so choose.

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Graduating in May 2023 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students listed are recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.

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You're standing in the middle of this vast—as far as the eye can see—grassland. And this thing that you just let go of in downtown Boulder has traveled there on its own. There's this moment of disbelief until you're right there with it. ~ Zack Weaver, CEAS lecturer, ATLAS Institute

Video from almost 101,000 feet, beginning shortly before the balloon bursts.

First students built the instrumentation. Then they attached it to a high-altitude weather balloon that took it to an altitude of 101,000 feet. Thanks to the geolocation technology they had incorporated, they were then able to locate it 120 miles away in Eastern Colorado. 
 

The collaborative project was part of a class taught by ATLAS Lecturer Zack Weaver called Creative Technologies, a required class in the College of Engineering MS in Creative Technology and Design, offered through the ATLAS Institute. 

The instrumentation they built included an Arduino microcontroller connected to sensors that measured and recorded location, temperature, air pressure and altitude. A GoPro was sent along for the ride, capturing continuous video of the four-hour flight that began outside the Boulder Public Library’s BLDG 61 Makerspace, where Weaver works, and ended in a field in Eastern Colorado 120 miles away.

The students, many of whom began the class without much of a technical background, wrote and tested the code for the microcontroller, designed and built the insulated casing that held the camera and protected the electronics and batteries from temperatures of approximately -35° Fahrenheit. The payload design allowed environmental sensors and a GPS antenna to capture and record data to an SD card. The students were then able to plot and compare flight simulation data and actual data visualized in Google Earth.

“The students learned which creative technologies could be used to pull off this feat,” Weaver said. “It’s probably not the right terminology, but they get a ‘crash course’—learning many things very quickly.”

Besides coding and electronics, students also learned wireless communication, design and fabrication techniques, including laser cutting, 3D printing and integrating electronic components into the student-designed payload. As required by the Federal Aviation Administration, the team registered the balloon flight, providing its anticipated flight path based on their models.

“This class is a blast,” said Neill Shikada, who is enrolled in the Creative Industries track of the ATLAS Creative Technologies and Design master's program. “I've come from knowing nothing about electronics to designing quite a few aspects of the instrumentation for our balloon flight."

Alejandra Guerro, a social impact master’s student, echoed Shikada’s sentiments. “I'm definitely enjoying the class,” she said.  “A lot of technologies that seemed intimidating or difficult, now feel more accessible. I've learned that I can learn just about anything with enough Googling, patience and help from classmates.”

“Needle in a stack of needles”
As the pressure decreased with the rising altitude, the 7-foot-diameter balloon at ground level expanded to an estimated 25 feet before bursting. Its dizzying descent was captured .

Prediction software provided an estimate of the balloon’s location within a five-kilometer radius. Then, using the Automated Packet Reporting System (APRS), a ham radio network connected directly to a web server, they were able to pinpoint the balloon’s location to within one-tenth of a mile. As a backup, the team put a small commercial GPS tracker onboard that tracked the balloon's position online in real-time, but the APRS system worked perfectly. 

“We added as many redundant tracking systems as possible without weighing it down more than necessary,” Weaver said. “Every gram is critical to how high the balloon can fly.”

Because the flight took approximately four hours, Weaver and some of the students had plenty of time to drive out to Eastern Colorado, initially aiming for where they thought the balloon would land and then course-correcting once they had actual coordinates. 

“We dream of seeing this thing coming down, but in Eastern Colorado, it’s like finding a needle in a stack of needles,” Weaver said.

Crash course
In addition to mapping the actual flight path on Google Earth, students were asked to analyze variations and anomalies compared to the predicted flight path. While examining the data, students discovered that the sensors recorded higher temperatures than the APRS reported and concluded they were mistakenly measuring the interior of their insulated casing. They also learned the limitations of a $5 altitude sensor, which loses accuracy over 60,000 feet.  

“These limitations, and the opportunity to read the data to discover them, are intentionally baked into the experience,” said Weaver. “It contextualizes the affordances and constraints of the toolset.”
 
“The project helped the students understand that they can’t learn all creative technologies,” he added. “We set a context that provided constraints for deciding which technologies are needed and to what extent. It helped them to not be overwhelmed by an overabundance of choices.” 
    
The balloon flight was the key project for the first half of the Creative Technologies course; the second half is designed so students use the balloon experience as a reference for their independent design projects. There’s also a lineup of guest speakers, giving students diverse perspectives on similar types of technologies and how they are used professionally.

“I've shown them a reasonable amount of new technologies,” Weaver said. “The students will define any additional technologies they need to work with on a more individual basis. So at this point, they're in charge of the class, and I'm just there as support to run logistics and to bring in cool people for them to meet.

“I remember sometimes feeling almost complete isolation as a grad student on campus," said Weaver. "Getting off-campus and out in the world came as such a novelty. I think this group of students had that experience, particularly driving out to Eastern Colorado. And they didn't just learn how to work with electronics and design tools; they applied them, and it took them to new places."

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For the second year running, Creative Technology and Design students won first place at the largest university hackathon in the Rocky Mountain region, HackCU, held this year March 5-6 on the CU Boulder campus. Another student, whose two majors include CTD and computer science, took second place this year as the sole member of his team. 

Océane Andreis (MS-CTD), Katherine Tran (BS-CTD), Sangati Shah (engineering and business, CTD minor) and Patricia Chin (computer science, minoring in CTD and business) together won first prize overall, as well as the social impact prize, for their project , which helps users understand what they consent to when agreeing to data privacy terms and conditions. The team of four formed after working together as organizers of the ATLAS Institute’s 2022 , a hackathon that aims to attract women and other groups typically underrepresented at such events. (majoring in computer science and CTD, with a business minor) won second prize overall for his solo invention, , a web-based game engine/platform where technical novices can create their own remixes of the classic Wordle game. Creatle also won the Best Game and Entertainment Prize.

Last year, CTD undergraduate students Mason Moran and Colin Soguero, working alongside Colin's brother, Luke Soguero (computer science), took first prize at HackCU for their project, ChessLens, an augmented reality application that helps chess players improve their game.
 
HackCU is an annual invention marathon where participants build and share their creations in just 24 hours. This year there were 29 submissions from 96 participants. The TL-DR team and Bodzianowski won electronics and other prizes. 

All of this year's ATLAS winners said that participating in T9Hacks was a key component of their success.
 
“We felt inspired by the T9Hacks participants who worked incredibly hard, and we wanted to work just as hard,” Andreis said.
 
Inspired by others

Bodzianowski said his Creatle invention was inspired by T9Hack’s winning entry, Complexify, a Worldle-like game platform. 

“Creatle is my attempt to create a platform for people to create, share and play their own remixes of the classic Wordle format with minimum effort,” he said.

But things did not go well at first for Bodzianowski. First he arrived an hour late to the hackathon; then at 3 a.m. he decided to scrap the experimental technologies he was using and restart his project. He almost quit, he said, but then pivoted to the technologies he used during the 2022 T9Hacks hackathon. 

“With the help of a copious amount of caffeine, I was able to get a working prototype of Creatle finished just in time for judging,” he said. 

At that point the actual "create" part of Creatle wasn't working— instead Bodzianowski showed the judges how he made the games through a development database and focused on the technical and design aspects of the project. 

TL-DR allows users to take control of their data by encouraging them to stay informed about their data privacy. The solution is two-pronged: first a Google Chrome extension displays the terms and conditions of a viewed platform in short digestible bullet points. There’s also a website that helps users visualize the data that they willingly provide when blindly agreeing to website terms and conditions.

All of TL-DR’s team members had completed ethics classes where data privacy was covered, such as the "Meaning of Information Technology." Those ATLAS classes helped inspire their project idea, Tran said.  

“Most people accept the lack of data privacy as the price to pay for free services,” she said. “Having learned about the extensive information that huge technology companies collect and seeing how invasive and harmful it can be, we felt motivated to respond to this topic.”

Everyone on the TL-DR team played to their strengths, Shah said. Andreis coded the Chrome extension and worked alongside Tran on the website. Chin prototyped the team’s  visuals while Shah pulled together the sample data and reviewed terms and conditions.
  
“In the midst of all the coding and designing, we had lots of fun eating the food, attending the side events, and, of course, just enjoying each others’ company—like any other team would,” Tran said.

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[video:https://vimeo.com/612991101]

Chicana Light also explores Fautheree ��á����ܱ��'s identity, political awakening and sense of pride as a Chicana woman.

Voces Vivas honors the early Boulder County Latino/a/x/e families and their histories to date. The exhibit, which is in partnership with the Latino History Project and University of Colorado Boulder's Ethnic Studies Department, builds upon the work local Latinos have been doing to preserve and share their stories.

Voces Vivas opened Feb 26 and runs through Feb 26, 2023. The exhibit was made possible with financial support from the Boulder Arts Commission, the Community Foundation of Boulder County, the Dodge Family Fund, Terrapin Care Station and the Horning Family.  

More information about .

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