Buying locally grown produce directly has benefits. For consumers, the food tastes better, they have a closer relationship with the product and vendors, and they have access to more varieties. Farmers have more freedom to set prices and exist outside of food industry constraints. The best local produce is often available at farmer's markets, which can be hard to access, don't offer one-stop shopping, and take a bigger bite out of the consumer's wallet.

Over one semester, my team and I researched the local produce lifecycle (visiting a farm, the farmers market, an urban food project in Detroit). We created a prototype web site for coordinating distributed farmers markets, tested and evaluated its effectiveness, and drew conclusions for the future.

Choosing mass transit over a personal car often requires an individual sacrifice, yet is in many ways better for society. Riders of the University of Michigan bus system can reduce wait times at the stop by viewing real-time bus locations and expected arrival times on a web site, the Magic Bus, and planning when to go wait for the bus.

My team and I researched the riding experience and how the Magic Bus fits in to the bigger picture. By the end of the semester, we made recommendations for the existing interface and how/why to spread real-time mass transit information beyond the web site.

The video game Rock Band appeals to a broad range of players. My team and I researched why people play the game with observation sessions, interviews, and a heuristic evaluation. We organized our findings with personas, scenarios, and a discussion of how people learn and collaborate in the game. This kickstarted our academic white paper, published by ISU.

We discovered Rock Band's mix of fantasy, popular music, non-competitive play with separate tasks for different skill levels, and brief sessions are traits that be applied to many types of social games. We made recommendations in the following areas: how to inspire more discussion among players, how to better engage spectators, centralized task control, making the fantasy more interactive, and solutions for usability problems.

Microsoft OneNote 2007 is an Office application for organizing information. Over one semester, my team and I evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of tags with methods such as a heuristic evaluation, a usability test, and surveys. We found that performing actions with tags required very precise manipulation of the interface, using icons to depict tags can confuse people if the image isn't really evocative, and performing some actions on tags yields unexpected results.

GROCS (Grant Opportunities for Collaborative Studies) seeks and funds semester-long research and exhibit proposals from interdisciplinary student teams. My team and I were awarded the opportunity to explore a question: How could music instruments for the iPhone OS inspire non-musicians to create music? During our research, we noticed the threat of judgement can sometimes deter trying new things, and wanted to make an instrument where the composer would have to try hard to sound bad. We prototyped a gesture-controlled percussion instrument app, which I later developed and designed into a complete application (Hoopla).

In 2006, Apple debuted a series of ads featuring a personified Mac and PC, poking fun at PC user stereotypes and the Windows OS. My team and I wanted to know if the stereotypes are valid and surveyed grad students to learn about their demographics, behaviors, and computer use. Using statistics software (R Project), we ran tests (chi-squared, fisher's exact, one-way ANOVA) and found the stereotypes are generally not significantly associated with the behaviors and computer use of grad students.

However, not all claims were unfounded. The ads significantly (alpha=.05) portray an association between OS and Anti‐Virus Habits, Use of Design Software, and Relationship Seeking Status. The commercials significantly (alpha=.05) portray a false association between OS and Socializing Habits.

I was a co-chair of FuturTech 2009, a business and technology conference, at the Ross School of Business. We coordinated the event -- arranging panels, venues, sponsors, outreach -- and managed about 20 volunteers. About 300 graduate students came to the event, which featured three keynotes, eight panel discussions, a case competition, and a tech fair.