Hello! My name is Ridley, and I am a PhD student in Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. I am currently advised by Charlotte Lee and am also working with Mark Haselkorn. Previous collaborators include Sean Munson, Gary Hsieh and Katharina Reinecke.
I am currently seeking summer research and design internship opportunities. I am particularly capable at ethnographic methods and interviewing, with users and designers of technologies and in complex organizations.
I am interested in a variety of subjects, including but not limited to:
- Complex infastructures and the “shadow systems” that get created to cope with their implementation
- Regional transit systems
- Science communication tools and strategies
- Resilience and remote working
- Ethical and conceptual issues with large-scale technological changes (e.g., how does childhood development change as social robots become ubiquitous? Is it possible to use value-sensitive design to create machine learning algorithms that “discipline and punish”?)
- New value-sensitive design methodologies
- New ideas and methods for usability. In particular, how does usability get evaluated when the “user” is an organization, with its own pressures and internal logic and where agency to make decisions on software isn’t evenly distributed? Check out a report I wrote on the subject here. If you have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear from you!
In real life, I love prog rock, cooking, consuming and occasionally producing science fiction and poetry, and my cat Cutieus Maximus.