My research offers tactics for making AI and biometric systems more ethical and inclusive, by leveraging uniquely human strengths of emotion, embodiment, and imagination.

Projects

Collage of textures in blue, pink, mossy green, in organic shapes over white background.
Fabulation for Design Futuring
Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds.
Polyvocal Perspectives for Design Futuring
This un-manifesto calls for greater diversity in approaches for design futuring and offers five idiosyncratic approaches drawing from our own personal, cultural, and professional backgrounds.
Expanding Modes of Reflection for Design Futuring
We offer modes of reflection to help design researchers deepen their practice with design futuring: designerly formgiving, temporal representations, positionality and privilege, public engagement, and anticipatory phenomena.
Exploring Technological Mediation in Sufi Spiritual Practices
We explore Sufi spiritual practices of collective chanting and how technological mediation may shift these spiritual experiences when groups choose to offer online or hybrid participation.
The Heart Sounds Bench, a cedar chest with two red stethoscope handles.
Life-Affirming Biosensing with the Heart Sounds Bench
The Heart Sounds Bench amplifies live unfiltered heart sounds. It resists the colonial impulse to make people transparent via data, instead inviting people to appreciate the live presence and unknowable complexity of one another.
PREMIER: Performance Residencies in Electronic Music for Interdisciplinary Education Research
PREMIER was a series of artist residencies that brought interdisciplinary STEAM education to Georgia Tech students and the Atlanta community with participatory music, arts, and performance opportunities incorporating audio technology and electronics in service of creative practice.
Noura stands behind an ironing board, in one hand is a red stethoscope handle on the ironing board, in the other hand is a transducer on the ironing board.
Embodied Transductions through Musical Practice
Embodied Transductions explores alternative ways of knowing bodies, both human and non-human, through hacking biomedical technology for musical expression.
Close-up of inside of inflatable, showing crinkled white and silver curving interior surface of inflatable.
Feeling Air: Exploring Aesthetic and Material Qualities of Architectural Inflatables
These large-scale inflatable sculptures explore material, aesthetic, and somatic qualities of interactive inflatable structures.
Infrastructural Membranes
This inflatable sculpture explores take-for-granted infrastructures of data, air, and feeling.
A large white inflatable sculpture about 12 feet tall wraps in a semicircle. In the background is a suburban street.
Salaam Participatory Peace Sculpture
This sculpture is inspired by the Arabic word salaam, used as a greeting to wish peace upon others. The sculpture responds to mounting Islamophobia in the US with a strong, tall form that is at the same time peaceful, gentle, and inviting.
Tiled images showing various projects enrolling biodata.
Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives
Emotion AI predicts emotions and other psychological characteristics from biodata. This project helps chart dominant trends driving technological innovation in Emotion AI, critique ethical harms emerging in this space, and offer alternative approaches for Emotion AI to more respectfully support diverse ways of living good lives.
A woman and a man sit next to each other at booth seating in a restaurant. The man is pointing to the color-changing embroidery display on his sleeve, while looking at the woman. The woman is also looking at the display on his sleeve.
Color-Changing Garments for Emotional Reflection
This project explores, how does emotional biodata get embroiled in questions of how or what we should feel or be? This design leverages ambiguity to display emotional predictions in a way that invites people to make their own interpretations. Still, tensions arose when people invested too much authority in the technology.
An illustration of a white hand holding a menstrual cup with blood in it and grooves and dots on the outside. The illustration is grayscale except for the red blood.
Speculating Near-Future Menstrual Biosensing
We created a set of speculative designs exploring the future of menstrual biosensing technologies for surveillance at home and work.
A closeup of chocolate bar graphs representing laughter.
Cherishing Laughter as Biosensory Data
We present preliminary design explorations of tangible representations of laughter and discuss interaction design opportunities for celebration, cherishing, and reflection.
A close-up of purpose woven fabric with inlay in a pattern of a four by four grid of squares. Some of the squares are the same purple color as the background fabric, while others are white.
Color-Changing Fabric as Realtime Data Display
This project explores using dynamic color-changing fabric as a novel kind of data display that invites different ways of engaging with data in everyday life.
A white wall has a black silhouette of a person displayed on it. The silhouette is overlaid with white rectangles coming out of the wall. To the side of the silhouette is a white bucket mounted on a white shelf. The bucket has a handle on top. An audio cable extends out of the bucket leading a stethoscope that is hanging from the wall roughly where the silhouette's chest or heart would be.
Heart Sounds in Cheap Plastic Buckets
The Heart Sounds Buckets explore an uncomfortable contrast of hearing the live unfiltered heart sounds of gallery visitors, as precious and intimate, contrasted with their emanation from cheap plastic buckets, a cold sterile material, to invite reflection on biomedicalization of everyday life.
A crowd of people, whose faces are covered in bright paper masks that playfully look like VR headsets, are reaching their arms upward at slightly different angles.
Performing VR Together
This short participatory performance reimagined virtual reality centered around collective local embodied presence.
The Intel Galileo microcontroller with a pin in the bottom left showing the award Interaction Awards 2016 Shortlisted.
Intel Connect Anything Prototyping Kit
This prototyping kit enables using the Intel Galileo microcontroller through GUI programming.
A woman (facing away from the camera) reaches her arm upward. On a screen in front of her she is shown overlaid on an image of outer space, as if she were flying through outer space. Another person is shown on the screen also flying through space in a silly arms-outstreteched position.
WaaZam!
WaaZam supports shared creative play at a distance.
An abstract texture in sickly shades of dull brown, yellow, bluish green, and orange. To the lower left, the text is more smooth. To the upper right, the texture is rougher.
Defamiliarizing Sound with Granular Synthesis
Blending textures of familiar sounds from everyday life to explore new sonic textures.
A woman head and shoulders are visible against a white background. She is leaning to one side and wearing glasses.
Reading NeurIPS Paper Titles
Reading the titles of papers published in advances in Neural Information Processing Systems from 2019, as a performative attempt to distill efforts to stay abreast of rapidly evolving research landscapes.
A person demonstrates wearing the Myo armband and moving their arm up and down while using the audio plugin we developed to change an audio parameter in the DJ software.
Myo-Controlled DJ Effects
We made an effects controller that uses the Myo armband, so arm movements can be used to adjust audio effects in the audio software of choice.
An example Lissajous harmonograph pattern.
Harmonograph Visualizer
An interactive Lissajous visualizer of sine waves.
A screenshot showing the Chladni patterns provided by our interface. It shows the waves as black and white gradients emanating from the center of the surface and then reflecting off the edges of the square surface.
Chladni Waves Visualizer
An interactive visualizers of waves propagating across a plane.
An old logo for The Echo Nest, depictig cute animated animals gathered around a speaker, perhaps dancing, and a ghost playing banjo.
Music & Data at The Echo Nest
As a software engineer at small music data startup The Echo Nest, I worked on a variety of data-driven web applications. The Echo Nest was later bought by Spotify.