Faculty News: Axel Roesler

Interaction Design Assistant Professor Axel Roesler has been successfully pursuing grants during the past year. He won a Boeing grant of $150,000 for developing “new design concepts for the physical layout of the commercial flight deck, spatial flight data organization, and interaction design to support flight operations.” The grant was just renewed for an additional $120,000. This supports research by him, graduate students Nate Landes and Stephen Minarsch, and other students.

Roesler received a $56,000 subcontract for a research project with the Institute for Simulation and Interprofessional Studies (ISIS) at the UW School of Medicine. His project involves interaction design and interface development for a Medical Emergency Black Box Information System (MEBBIS), an iPad-based realtime documentation application that assists during the documentation of medical emergencies. He also received $28,000 as part of a SHARP grant for work on patient-centered cognitive support. The UW portion of the grant is led by the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering; this is part of a larger grant through the University of Texas, Houston. The research for this grant will explore how a work-centered design process can improve the work of healthcare professionals with health information technology.

Under Roesler’s direction, a group of students (Andrew Battenburg, Minnie Bredow, Tim Damon, Sophie Milliotte, Jon Sandler, and Tanya Test) participated in the Microsoft Design Expo 2010. Their project was titled “Open Door.” In October 2010, “Open Door” was featured at the Service Design Network Conference in a presentation by Shelley Evenson of Microsoft. A video demonstrates “Open Door.” Roesler currently has several teams of students working on projects for the Microsoft Design Expo 2011.

Intel Labs in Seattle awarded Roesler a $20,000 research grant for “Design of New Interaction Methods and User Interfaces for the Home of the Future”, which last year supported graduate student Nate Landes as the first design research associate at Intel. While there, Landes worked on project OASIS. His work was successfully demonstrated last summer and received press in WIRED magazine and MIT’s Technology Review. Shweta Grampurohit, another Design MFA student, has more recently worked at Intel with OASIS; her project involves Legos. It came in second at the Intel Sandy Bridge Challenge and was chosen for demonstration at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which took place in January. Intel has a webpage that describes the OASIS research with which both Landes and Grampurohit were involved, and it includes links to videos and a research paper.

In early December 2010, Roesler presented a paper at The Image Conference 2010. His presentation was titled “A New Model for Perspective: Patterns of Perspective Change and the Ecology of Point of View and Resulting Image.”