Research
I’m ReeD Martin, a Research Assistant at the MIT Media Lab in the Information Ecology group. I strive to research and create technology that can drive change: increasing quality of life, enabling social connections, and building a better relationship with our world. I'm a liberal arts kid in a world of technology.
My background is in cognitive studies, media studies, and human-computer interaction with a BA from Carleton College. I worked at Apple for 5 years as a feature and interaction designer on a few nifty apps you might have heard of.
Drop me a line: reedm / media (dot) mit [dot] edu. Now let's talk about projects.
If everyone says time is relative, why is it still so rigidly defined? There have been many attempts to address the issue of coordinating schedules, but each of these attempts runs into an issue of rigidity: in order to negotiate an event, a specific time must be designated in advance. This model is inherently poor at accommodating life’s unpredictability. Kairoscope looks at time from a human perspective: allowing people to coordinate events socially and on the fly, without worrying about precision. This project evaluates the potential implications of a shared, malleable schedule, as well as the data inputs and user interactions necessary to create such a system.
» Media Lab Kairoscope Project Page
Functionally, television content delivery has remained largely unchanged since the introduction of television networks. NeXtream explores an experience where the role of the corporate network is replaced by a social network. User interests, communities, and peers are leveraged to determine the television content, combining sequences of short videos to create a set of channels customized to each user. This project creates an interface to explore television socially, connecting a user with a community through content, with varying levels of interactivity: from passively consuming a series, to actively crafting one's own television and social experience.
» Paper Published at IEEE CCNC 2010
» Media Lab NeXtream Project Page
Home automation has largely remained a field for the technologically-savvy—those that are willing to spend hours custom designing, troubleshooting, and building software tools. It is clear, however, that there is great potential in adding layers of information and action to everyday objects and spaces, enabling new interactions and providing access to usage patterns. In this paper, we introduce RUBE, an object-oriented visual toolkit for home automation. RUBE is designed to empower users to easily add basic interactions to objects and build activities and actions around them.
The broadcast social network model is predominantly distributed using text feeds while directed conversations often occur using audio or video. In other words, your Facebook and Twitter feeds are basically conversations limited to text. What if you could hear all of your friends interject comments from around the globe—a conference call with all your friends? Audialog looks at a model of using a Facebook and Twitter-style stream of audio, engaging people remotely both asynchronously and in real-time.
We've all been in situations where we can't take a phone call because it's inappropriate to talk, can't text message with a friend because we're driving, or can't video chat because we're still in our pajamas at noon. Talkspan turns this around by empowering each party in a conversation to communicate in their own desired medium. Talkspan reduces audio and video communication down to snippets like lines of text in a chat, enabling a more flexible interaction whether one is communicating with text, audio, or video.
While computer data can live virtually anywhere, we are still faced with the mundane tasks of document management such as uploading, sharing, and syncing between locations. Window Wallet aims to remove the burden of managing your data across screens, computers, and devices by turning your portable device into a virtual wallet of data and software. This project looks at developing an interface that facilitates this process, acting on your mobile device as a virtual conduit between local data and data in the cloud, allowing you to both access and transfer documents independently of your physical location.
Much of information visualization is done, as the name would imply, visually. While much research has looked into haptic feedback to help a human “feel” their way through information or interfaces, very little research looks at the ways smell can provide us with information or lead to user actions. InfoSmell looks at ways we can use our sense of smell to notify, indicate, or even persuade users.
We have a limited range of hearing, defined primarily by volume and distance. As one moves further away from a constant sound, it becomes quieter. What if it didn’t have to? Audiograph looks at how positional and orientation information can help us bridge distance barriers for audio, and create seamless audio interactions between individuals, places, and information.
Coordination of and communication between large numbers of individuals, especially in situations that are prone to change rapidly, requires a common output and a recognizable input. Shake4Action looks at how we can organize large groups by augmenting SMS, email, and phone calls with mobile gestures. This project builds a platform to receive information of varying types (keywords, touch tones, and gestures), and return information that can be re-interpreted on output by each participant.
Packages move through cities regularly delivering goods into and out of the city, as well as within the city itself. There are a variety of systems in place to handle this load, but virtually all of them are designed uniquely for that task (e.g., a delivery truck). This project evaluates the possibility of using the existing, unused transport capacity of a city (Paris) to deliver packages: the people on public transit and cars with empty seats and trunks. The goal of this project is to reduce the number of vehicles required to make deliveries, decrease gas consumption and carbon footprint, reduce urban road congestion, and help to build connections between individuals and places in the city.