I grew up in Northern California first on a goat dairy in the
South Bay and then among the grape vines in the North Bay. I
have always been fascinated by storytelling: in short stories,
in live storytelling, in video games, in movies, in plays, in
the ways people get together to tell the stories of their
lives.
I am always looking for new ways to tell stories: as an
interaction designer, inventor, human computer interface creator,
puppetmaster, writer, playwright, and commentator, creating new
content for entertainment, education, and the elucidation of our
world.
My educational background is in interaction design and
multimodal user interface design, with two degrees from MIT and
recent work designing and building games and ARGs for training. My
avocational work is in playwriting, short stories, and
children's books.
I am currently looking for a job doing user interface design,
game design, or project management.
Details of some of my projects can be found
below.
Games
Helical Training: Dark Waters
Helical Training is an adaptation of Alternate Reality Games to create medium-intensity, long-duration training for information management, organizational navigation, and communication skills. The Dark Waters scenario put over a hundred trainees in an imagined Joint Forces Task force on a humanitarian mission after a natural disaster.
I worked on the Dark Waters team developing the story line, training goals, and the Looking Glass Interface, a specially-designed instrumented web portal. During the run, I served as a puppetmaster, playing several group leaders.
Dyad Puzzles
SABRE is a game-based testbed for psychological research developed at BBN Technologies and funded by AFRL. SABRE provides a fully-instrumented environment built on top of Bioware's Neverwinter Nights.
The Dyad puzzles are a collection of two-person collaborative puzzles. Participants must traverse mazes, solve riddles in the puzzle house, negotiate with each other, and balance the weight of a ship.
Adaptability Training
Adaptability Training was also based on SABRE. I worked with a team to develop a humanitarian scenario in which participants had to solve problems with food distribution in a small town.
Oz: off the yellow brick road
In January of 2005, I participated in Storytelling
and Games in the Digital Age, a week-long class
sponsored by Sony Pictures Imageworks and MIT's Comparative
Media Studies. My team developed a pitch for a family
adventure game based on three books in Frank
Baum's Oz series.
Oz: Off the Yellow Brick Road brings the
wonderful world of Oz into your home in a game for the
young at heart. Play alone, play with your child, or enter
the game with your child to see her exploits written up in
Glinda's Magic Book. Oz allows for single-player,
multi-player, and networked exploration for children and
their families, as Dorothy and her cohort, or as a host of
other characters from Jack Pumpkinhead to a winged
monkey.
Software and User Interface Architecture and Design
Permanent Design
I was at the Media Lab Europe from 2003
to 2004. While there, I worked on a project called Permanent
Design.
As we move toward truly adaptive multimodal designs, the
complexity of the systems we build is increasing
exponentially. We need a way to codify design criteria so
that even as a system adapts it remains usable, and, in some
sense, designed. In Permanent Design, I am creating an
architecture for the generation of multimodal systems,
taking into account the preferences and needs of a given
user or situation.
This architecture allows for the building of evolving
content that both adapts to the reader and dynamically
incorporates changes, revisions, and additions by the author
or authors, without requiring them to recreate each
presentation with every change.
Travelogue
A travel guide can have many different meanings, from strict text listings of places with their opening hours and costs in the Rough Guide to the writings of authors like Paul Theroux, which give the feel of a place, but no idea what the train schedule will be.
In different situations, we want different versions of
the information. In the afternoon, we want to know what time
the Louvre will close. Just before bed, though, we might
want to read descriptions of the history, the art, and the
people who have been here before.
Travelogue is a part of Permanent Design, and uses generous
generation of variants to create a variety of display
options that are close to what the user wants, and then a
rigorous scoring metric to choose the best one. The input is
in the form of xml files containing the descriptive content
and the user configuration.
UI on the Fly
In UI on the Fly, we are developing a technique that
allows a computer to automatically generate multimodal
user interfaces, in particular for small computers such as
cell phones or iPAQs. We enable these devices to engage in
natural language conversation, using screen and voice
output, and touch-screen and voice input at the same
time.
The output is tailored to the particular usage situation
(in a restaurant, in the car, at home), as well as to the
device and to the preferences of the user. The central
system can thus remain blissfully agnostic as the user
switches from using a phone, to a PDA, to a computer, and
back.
FASiL is an EU consortium project. The UI on the Fly
project was created as a part of FASiL at the Media Lab
Europe by David Reitter, Erin Panttaja, and Fred Cummins.
InFlection/Tel@Go
From 1998 to 2003 I worked at InTouch Systems (which was
bought by Comverse Network Systems during my tenure as a
software engineer). I was part of the design and
implementation team for InFlection (later rebranded as
Tel@Go), a voice-based personal assistant for managing
messaging, todo lists, calendars, and contact lists over the
phone.
I then headed the team that created a localization and
internationalization paradigm for maintaining a code base in
multiple languages, including French, German, and
Portuguese. This included managing the team that created a
German version of Tel@Go for CeBIT in 2000.
Later, as a consultant, I worked as a liaison between
engineers and patent lawyers and aided in the filing of
several patents.
CrossTalk
At the MIT Media Lab, in 1997, we created CrossTalk as
part of the Literary Salon, an attempt to use technology
to encourage people to engage with language and
with strangers.
CrossTalk playfully mediates language and communication
for two or more simultaneous users and their audience. Its
two interlaced, oversized keyboards, one made of mahogany
keys, and one of maple, force users to negotiate shared
space. As they type, the keys whisper words that appear to
cascade onto a shared screen.
Theatre Projects
Conflict
Conflict: I heard her get up; Make it didn't
happen is a play for two spaces. It is intended to be
performed simultaneously in two different performance
spaces by different casts. Each will include a window,
video and audio, into the other to be used generally
and at particular noted points in the scripts. In each
space, the audience will experience a complete story; they
may choose to view the other side at another time, but it
will be a different experience.
The eventual goal of this project is to explore the
storytelling possibilities of allowing actors to interact,
live, with performers in other locations, and to allow
playwrights to explore new ways to show multiple sides of
a story.
Conflict received a workshop production at the
Dublin Fringe
Festival's Thread Workshop with Oonagh Kearney, Thomas
Conway, Ailís Ní Ríain, and John
Breen. It was directed by Vallejo Gantner and Jeffrey
Gormley with videography by Erin Panttaja and Caroline
McSweeney. Technical setup and video and audio editing was
done by Erin Panttaja.
Make it didn't happen was performed as part of the
Mendocino College Theatre Arts Department's Third Annual
Festival of New Plays.
Thread Workshop
From April 17 to May 2, 2004, I was an invited participant in the Dublin Fringe Festival's Thread Workshop in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. The workshop was a setting for the exploration of new uses of text in the theatre. While there, I created Simultaneous Theatre and participated in Cosán Dearg (below), as well as creating, performing, doing technical support, and mentoring several other pieces. Afterward, I worked on the final presentation DVD (video editing, technical production, and reproduction) for the workshop.
Cosán Dearg
I did live hand-held camera work, technical crew work, and video editing for a workshop production of Ó Conchúir, Byrne, and Feeney's Cosán Dearg.
Imaaginaarium
I was one of the builders of the Soul Gun Warriors' Imaaginaarium at the Mór Festival, a music festival at the Charleville Castle in Tullamore, Ireland, in August of 2004. Inside the Imaaginaaruim, we performed "3some," a participatory theatre piece by Jeff Gormly.
h
I provided general assistance for h, Loose Canon Theatre Company's interpretation of Hamlet at the Dublin Fringe Festival in October of 2004. This included brainstorming work, photography, and audio and visual special effects.
Selected Writings
The Krampus
The Krampus was selected for Twisted Christmas Stories 3! in December of 2005. It was later broadcast on KRCB 91.1 FM in California's North Bay.
Katya's Opuscule
Katya's Opuscule tells the story of a strong, mature woman trying to find her place in the world. Katya's story is told as a combination of present action, flashbacks to her past, and stories (the opuscules of the title) told by her future self. The stories step outside of the narrative of the piece and use puppetry as spectacle to show glimpses of her past and future. Use of three actors to play the lead and one actor to play the significant men in her life emphasize the parallels she is trying to escape from. Katya's Opuscule was written for 6-8 actors with some double casting, and has not been produced.
Clockwork Bird
Clockwork Bird describes Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer and the daughter of Lord Byron raised by her mother as a scientist in the vain hope that she would not inherit her father's creative passion.
This story shows a collision between creativity and diligent reason, between sexuality and arithmetic, between Ada's identity as a woman and ambitions as a mathematician. Her mother tries to shoehorn her into a role, and the conflict between Ada's nature and that role lead both to advances in mathematics and to tragedy.
Clockwork Bird made it to the second round selection of the Sundance Sloan Felowship.
American Dragons
Emily Atkinson is a student of dragon lore. She hasn't
ever actually seen a dragon, but when she grows up she
plans to be a famous explorer and the world expert on
them. Unfortunately, nothing in her research has told her
anything about American dragons.
American Dragons is a 29,000-word contemporary
middle-grade novel describing eight-year-old Emily's
search for dragons.
Getaway Gloria
Seven-year-old Gloria's constant escaping worries her parents. They find her on the porch each morning, because she escapes from the house, but can't get back in. In an attempt to keep her at home, they tell her that she once had a brother. Getaway Gloria tells her story as a 1,200-word picture book manuscript in rhyme.
Londa went to Africa
Londa is an African-American girl on a trip to Namibia. Londa went to Africa is a 600-word picture book manuscript in rhyme describing her trip and all of the people, sights, and animals she sees there.
I wrote it during and after a trip I took to Namibia, about myself, the woman I traveled with, and a pair of shoes that should have existed.
Images copyright Media Lab Europe, MIT Media Lab, Dublin Fringe Festival, BBN Technologies, Bioware, and Erin Panttaja.