Contact Info

Twitter: @MatthewWSiu

Email: [email protected]

Overview

Three questions have been top of mind this year:

1. How can we help people discover new relationships and meaning?
   1. Explored different ways to introduce randomness and novelty to a user that would help nurture serendipitous connections [3] [5] [6]
   2. Played with ways to represent information in a spatial way. Both in our physical and digital environments. [5] [7] [8]
2. How can we improve the mediums we use to communicate complex ideas?
   1. Explored ways to surface relevant contextual information to ensure readers are able to follow along regardless of prior knowledge in a topic [1] [9]
   2. Explored how writers could help readers grasp complex mental models. [1] [4]
3. How can computers support independent and collaborative creation?
   1. Designed and prototyped a digital workshop space for people to come together, hang out and play. Community is built through repeated interaction so creating opportunities for this is the key. [8]
   2. Explored various creative exercises and challenges that could give people low stakes opportunities to create. [2] [8] [9] [10] [12]
   3. I hope to explore both of these things in new ways for the remainder of this year and into the next! [11][13][14]

Projects

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1398125698611441675?s=20

Writing should take steps to help a readers coming from different backgrounds.

Making multimedia annotations a standard could help.

Ex: Mention a place and a user could hover over the place name to pull up a google maps preview. Or mention a paper and get the PDF. Mentioning a name pulls up that person's wikipedia or personal site.

We often communicate complex ideas and models in our writing. How can we help readers piece together the model from the text?

One common model we try to communicate are timelines. Explored adding a timeline mapped to dates mentioned in the essay.

Prototype: tednelsonxanadu.matthewsiu.repl.co

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1421381068523851778?s=20

Exploring ways to get around writers block for first drafts. By preventing the user from using the backspace, you give them permission to make typos and to write half-baked thoughts.

https://www.matthewsiu.com/tools/writer/

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1368680641378852865?s=20

Data visualization is all about emphasizing certain dimensions of a dataset over others. I'm excited about the possibility of giving users the ability to easily explore various views. Each view optimized for answering a particular question.

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1385357465131307011?s=20

Visualizations of large connected graphs are often messy and overwhelming. Wanted to explore a graph view that might be more useful

This explorer lets you navigate a large graph of chinese characters and phrases. By seeing only the inbound and outbound links for the current node, this helps make a large graph more manageable to comfortably explore.

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1455393748624371716

Realized a lot of meaning is in the word choice a writer uses. Even when you explode the text, you keep a lot of the meaning of the original passage and get the added benefit of discovering your own meanings.

https://twitter.com/MatthewWSiu/status/1402385324806836233?s=20

Exploring a dream-like interface for forming serendipitous connections between artifacts in a collection.

The interface uses a similarity matching algorithm (TFIDF) to surface similar artifacts when you click on something

Generated a deck of cards for Christopher Alexander's pattern language. His ideas are meant to be composed together but it's tough to do so in book form. By creating a card deck, it becomes easier to play with the patterns in a spatial way, moving them around and discovering interesting connections.

https://vimeo.com/642209818

Cozyroom is a peer-to-peer spatial audio environment for hanging with friends

Helping my good friend, Azlen Elza, build some new features. Can embed synchronized videos and add image media to your space

https://vimeo.com/642210000

For an interaction design hackathon, used a technique called telescopic text to build the landing page

It lets you hide information and iteratively expand it based on what questions a user has next

interhackt.space