Casey Hunt is a PhD student in the THING LAB. She previously received her Master’s degree in Creative Technology and Design in 2021 from ATLAS, and her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Utah in 2015. Prior to attending graduate school, Casey worked in a biopharmaceutical startup company as an environmental monitoring and compliance analyst. Recording and reporting data from the various sensors, organisms, and equipment in the cleanroom made her aware of the patterns at work at the intersections of humans and hardware in the lab, which lead to her interest in tangible interfaces.
Today, Casey's research interests lie at the intersection of participatory design methodology and tangible user interface design. Previously, Casey worked with KidsTeam UW to co-design a tabletop telepresence robot system for remote creative collaboration with children. In summer 2022, Casey also worked with PhET and the Craft Tech Lab to use participatory design techniques to explore how sensory extensions might be used to make math simulations more accessible and engaging. In her work, Casey hopes to explore how to bring lab-phase prototypes of tangible interfaces to non-academics in order to facilitate a democratized approach to future directions in tangible interaction research.
Publications
C. L. Hunt, K. Sun, Z. Dhuliawala, F. Tsukiyama, I. Matkovic, Z. Schwemier, A. Wolf, Z. Zhang, A. Druin, A. Huynh, D. Leithinger, J. Yip. 2023. “Designing together, miles apart: A longitudinal tabletop telepresence adventure in online co-design with children”. In: ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC '23) (Chicago, IL, June 19-23, 2023).
Ran Zhou, Zachary Schwemler, Akshay Baweja, Harpreet Sareen, Casey Lee Hunt, and Daniel Leithinger. 2023. "TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Out-of-lab Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch". In: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany, April 23-28, 2023).
Ran Zhou, Zachary Schwemler, Akshay Baweja, Harpreet Sareen, Casey Lee Hunt, and Daniel Leithinger. 2023. "Demonstrating TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch". In: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg, Germany, April 23-28, 2023).
Chris Hill*, Casey Lee Hunt* (*shared first authorship), Sammie Crowder, Brett Fiedler, Emily B. Moore, and Ann Eisenberg. 2023. “Investigating Sensory Extensions as Input for Interactive Simulations”. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '23) (Warsaw, Poland, February 26 - March 1, 2023).
