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The Gap Kept Shrinking: What a Real Literature Review Looks Like
How I searched, what I found, and why being wrong four times made the project better. You can find my published literature review HERE and the associated bibliography HERE. When I started this review, I thought I had a pretty simple story: nobody had used haptic guidance to help a blind runner navigate at running…
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A Sketch That Runs
Version one of a simulator for a device that doesn’t exist yet. There’s a version of the LLR-1 running on my screen right now. It’s guiding a virtual runner around a track — staying quiet while she’s centered in her lane, speaking up when she drifts, warning her before each curve arrives. She veers the…
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Beyond the Device
A few months ago, I left Reed Elementary with a question I couldn’t answer. I had watched second graders play amputee soccer with the Bionic Project and saw how quickly an abstract idea became real once they could actually experience the sport. I kept wondering what the equivalent could be for visual impairment. A blindfold…
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Three Research Stages, No Prototype Yet
The plan behind the research, and why it’s built to change as I go. My advisor gave me an instruction a little while back that sounded, on the surface, like a delay: more research before you design anything. No prototype yet. No soldering. Research first. So this post is that instruction turned into an actual…
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A Dialogue of the Senses: What My Advisor’s Book Taught Me About Designing My Next Experiment
A few weeks ago, Professor Síle O’Modhrain’s new book landed on my desk: A Dialogue of the Senses: Designing Interaction with the Body in Mind, out this spring from MIT Press. I’d known it was coming — she’d mentioned it once, almost in passing, the way you mention something you’ve been working on for years. What…
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The Two-Second Rule That Nature Figured Out First
David Lee’s tau theory, and why distance is the wrong thing to measure There’s a moment in every near-miss on a running track that’s worth paying attention to. Not the collision itself. The moment just before it — when you realize something is wrong and your legs change what they’re doing before your conscious brain…
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Run Like a Fish Has a Faculty Advisor
I have some news that still feels a little surreal to write down: Professor Síle O’Modhrain has agreed to serve as the faculty advisor for Run Like a Fish. If you’ve been following this project, you know it started with a deceptively simple question — how do you give a visually impaired runner enough information…
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Running for a Reason: The Bionic 5K
This May, I participated in the Bionic 5K — a race put on by the Bionic Project to support adaptive athletes and inclusive sports. The official race was held in Cambridge, MA, but with finals season in full swing, I ran my 5K here in San Francisco instead. Different coast, same mission. The Bionic Project’s…
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Looks Like vs. Acts Like: A Day at Stanford CHAT
The most useful thing I learned all month was the difference between two kinds of prototypes I spent a Saturday at Stanford as an observer at CHAT — Co-design for Health and Athlete Technology. I wasn’t old enough to participate, so I just watched. That turned out to be its own kind of useful, because…