D+M is excited to introduce Kelly Dobson and Lalya Gaye as our two D+M Artist / Designer in Residence for the Spring 2009 Semester.

Kelly Dobson

Kelly Dobson grew up in a junkyard. From the age of four she was doing odd jobs such as smashing windows and hauling machine parts from one area of the yard to another. She had machine friends. By six she was holding car funerals and secretly stashing beloved car parts in her own hidden burrow in the far side of the lot. Abandoning the instability of the lot as a teenager in 1990, Dobson began studies in medicine and art, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University’s Department of Architecture, Art and Planning. The studies in medicine and art practice provide background for her interests in alternative forms of therapy. Working in the realms of art, design, engineering, psychology and society, Kelly explores the relationships between people and machines, and has received a Master of Science degree from MIT’s Visual Studies Program and another from the MIT Media Lab. Currently, as a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, she is developing a method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical engagement termed Machine Therapy. Machine Therapy is in response to the overwhelmingly pervasive effects of machines in everyday life. Machine Therapy is tangentially about the parapraxis of machine design — what machines do and mean for people other than what we consciously designed them to do and be used for. In her current work Kelly combines research in digital signal processing and machine learning, technology and society studies, and art and therapy. She builds empathic machines such as Blendie (web.media.mit.edu/~monster/Blendie), Wearable Organs such as ScreamBody (web.media.mit.edu/~monster/screambody), and organizes engagements with existing large culturally implicated machines.

URL: http://web.media.mit.edu/~monster

Lalya Gaye

HCI/interaction design freelance researcher with an engineering background who works in multidisciplinary projects at the convergence of art, technology and design. Usually based in Göteborg, Sweden, she is currently at Rhode Island School of Design as a visiting critic and artist in residence at the Digital + Media department.

Lalya received a B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Geneva, a M.Sc.Eng. in Electroacoustics at KTH in Stockholm, worked several years at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, and regularly teaches at the Interaction Design programme at the IT-University in Göteborg, while finishing a Ph.D. thesis in Applied Information Technology at the University of Göteborg. In Göteborg, she is part of the local art, design and technolgy collective Dånk!, in which she works on various projects centred around interactivity, urban space and audio experimentations, as well as co-organises the local Dorkbot-GBG meetings. She is also a member of the PLAN network for pervasive and locative arts, a permanent member of the steering committee for the International Workshop Series on Mobile Music Technology, and is actively involved in the NIME research community. She has presented her work at various international conferences, festivals and journals and regularly gives talks, workshops and lectures at universities, institutions and events worldwide.

In her research, she is interested in the relation between people and new technologies, in the context of contemporary culture and society: how to design new technologies that can challenge and inspire people creatively, and what aesthetic activities people come up with when having access to them. This covers a broad range of interests, from mobility and urban space, to aesthetic computer-mediated interactions such as electronic music making or digital photography, to physical interfaces and the integration of technology into everyday environments, artefacts and behaviours, i.e. ubiquitous computing. Her research explores in particular the potentials of mobile and ubiquitous computing for everyday life aesthetic practices and creative behaviours, and builds on mobile music, locative media and physical computing projects. She approaches her research question with a combination of user-centred, body-centric and culturally grounded interaction design, of physical prototyping and of user studies in context.

Her teaching builds on the multidisciplinary nature of interactive media and ubiquitous computing, and aims – just like her research – at building bridges between science and design; art and everyday life; academia and pop cultures; science and design; technology research and aesthetic practices.

Visiting Critic and Artist in Residence, Department of Digital + Media, Rhode Island School of Design:http://dm.risd.edu/~lgaye
Classes at DM http://dm.risd.edu/courses/7032/
PhD Candidate, University of Gothenburg (Sweden): http://www.ait.gu.se/
Dånk! Collective: http://www.daonk.org
Steering Committee Mobile Music Workshop: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org