BVK: Yes. If I’m on Zoom, it would track where I’m looking and know what I’m doing. If I need to type in chat, it will follow where I’m looking and what I did. Students from other disciplines might come in and start using it around projects they’re working on, too. Let’s say a computer science student is working on a web-based application, but they never thought about the user side. They might bring it into that lab and look for that type of feedback.
J.M.: Is there anything you think the McVey building will need that it’s not going to have right away?
BVK: A robotic coffee bar. (He laughs.) No, but really, I don’t know right now. The collaborative spaces will shape the vision. The nature of the building – these spaces for playing with ideas and not necessarily with physical things – will help us answer that question.
J.M.: I’ve heard you say that it’s not about where the tech is but where the tech is going. Where is tech going?
BVK: I really don’t know. I truly think anyone who definitively says what the future looks like; well, I probably wouldn’t listen to them. What I do see in our field are the trends that have always been there. We’re getting this combination of the digital with what’s going on in the physical world. We’re going to see more and more of that merging.
We exercised in the past. Then we got watches that could track our exercise. It changed how we exercise, right? Moving forward, what will be the next thing that will combine data and the ability to track how we operate and incorporate that combination into our everyday behaviors?
I do think one of the trends is the robotics part. I think we’re going to have physical agents around us in a lot of settings. We have food delivery robots on campus, but they’re really not interactive. What happens when we have a robot in the dining hall helping clear tables? That will happen in my kids’ lifetime, maybe not mine. So, we need to think about how physical technology operates in spaces with people.
J.M.: I’ve also heard you say that you don’t know what you’ll be teaching two years from now. What about two months from now?
BVK: Yeah. There are the base foundations. We teach a designer’s viewpoint of looking at human-centered problems. We teach code or code thinking – the way a programmer looks at the world – understanding logic and algorithmic ways that information comes together. The third pillar we teach are foundations around business. What are the factors that determine your operations and profitability to build sustainability from a financial point of view?
Together, how do I experience these things in my life? Maybe I want to stream a show on my phone during my lunch hour. I want an experience where, if I have to stop early and then I log in tonight at home, I’m at the same spot where I stopped. When I leave my car and stop listening to my podcast and then return to my car and to my podcast, but I’m taken back to the beginning of the episode; well, that’s a poor user experience. It’s very annoying. So, there’s a tech part and there’s a human understanding part.
J.M.: What are you streaming these days?
BVK: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Probably not what you expected? I’m pretty eclectic. I’m actually doing the retro thing with my son. We’ve been watching old Cheers episodes.
J.M.: Back to digital innovation and technology. People might say they prefer one thing, in a survey for example, but they might do another. So, observing human behavior is important in design thinking. Are there any projects the students in your department are working on that demonstrate the application of design thinking?
BVK: We had a project in conjunction with our Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology. They had a young patient who could not take in liquids orally and had extreme sensitivity due to earlier conditions. They found that the child would get excited when things would crash or break. So, if he ingested, they would crash down a pile of blocks as a reward. We created a video game that, as he sipped out of a straw, a character on a bridge would jump up and down. If the patient took in enough liquid, the bridge would break apart. If he didn’t get liquid out of the straw and into his mouth, the character wouldn’t jump. We built upon previous knowledge of the patient.
Also, one thing reported was that the child would only drink water. Because of the self-reporting, other liquids were avoided. The cup we developed occluded the liquid from the patient. He couldn’t see what he was drinking. We put milk in the cup, and he was drinking the same in that trial as if he was drinking water. There was no aversion to it. We were able to find that there wasn’t a physiological issue with milk. It was a self-imposed constraint for that individual user.
J.M.: That’s quite a project. The word around campus is that you and the department are committed to connecting students to those kinds of projects.
BVK: One of our strengths is providing undergraduate experiences that don’t happen everywhere else. We have always been a program that has looked to link students to what they want to do in a way that they can be successful.
Pieces (a company focused on improving developers’ productivity by using AI to manage their coding resources like code snippets, website links, messages, and screenshots) is a Cincinnati startup. When Tsavo Knott (co-founder and CEO) was a student here, he was working on that idea. There were times that instead of taking the required class in XYZ, which was not going to apply to where he wanted to go, we had independent studies that allowed him to explore his idea deeper.
Student commitment requires that kind of flexibility and having a faculty that can make learning about what the students want to do. And how can we mentor that? Our projects include building new things, working with clients, and talking to people in the community because those are the same skills they’re going to need. Those are the experiences they remember.