MELDING PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY
Director of CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute got her start in art school: That’s a plus
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
If a robot is interacting with you, it should probably apologize if it malfunctions.
That’s a general rule of thumb that Jodi Forlizzi discovered while creating an artificial scenario for a robot that she knew would make mistakes.
“We can vary how the robot would recover from its error,” Ms. Forlizzi said. “We can try hundreds of different things and test them out with people and see how they actually respond before we actually build the technology.”
As an interaction designer, she’s tasked with building these “user enactments” that let researchers dig into the ways people will react to technology.
In November, Andrew Moore, dean of the school of computer science, named Ms. Forlizzi director of the 25-year-old Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie MellonUniversity, which examines relationshipsbetween computer technology,human activity and society.
Her pathway into a tech career was unorthodox.
“Imagine someone in art school then moving to one of the leading science schools in Philadelphia and forging a lot of interesting relationships,” she said, reminiscing on her early years. “I’m definitely an outlier.”
Catching the research bug
After graduating from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a bachelor’s degree in illustration, she worked as an artist.
Before long, she was designing highly technical illustrations for science textbooks, creating graphics on stuttering and taste research at the University of Pennsylvania. That work was formative because those were her first interactions with scientists.
She officially caught the research bug and went back to school to earn her master’s degree in interaction design from CMU, then a nascent field.
In 1998, she began working as an innovator and project manager for former boutique qualitative research firm E-Lab LLC, based in Chicago. Half of the staff there were designers and the rest were