Hi, I’m Jingyi!

I’m a computer science educator and
human-computer interaction researcher.

A professional headshot of me, Jingyi. My hair color has probably changed.

I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College, where I direct the Doodle Lab. My work focuses on understanding, designing, and critiquing creativity support tools. I believe in the liberatory power of every day making and investigate how computation can augment these practices without displacing existing manual skills.

My PhD is from Stanford University where I was co-advised by Sean Follmer and Maneesh Agrawala. I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley, where I worked with Björn Hartmann.

Research

A hammer and some smahed Pokemon game cartridges, signalling misuse? I don't know. It was on Unsplash.

Toward appropriating tools for queer use

Jingyi Li

A short manifesto for the Halfway to the Future Symposium on why HCI should support appropriation and misuse inspired by Sara Ahmed's "What's the Use?".

Paper (PDF)  /  HTTF '24

Top, a word cloud describing concepts of normative ground. Bottom, axes that show vertical movement through layers of abstraction and horizontal movement to other tools as a guide for technical empowerment.

Beyond the artifact: power as a lens for creativity support tools

Jingyi Li, Eric Rawn, Jacob Ritchie, Jasper Tran O'Leary, Sean Follmer

When we see a creativity support tool (CST), we should see a power relationship. From interviews with 11 creative practitioners and tool designers, we build a preliminary theory of how power relationships can manifest in CSTs, and what we could do about it.

Zine  /  Paper (PDF)  /  UIST '23

A screenshot of the Quickpose app, which shows a graph in which different versions of an artwork are nodes.

Understanding version control as material interaction with Quickpose

Eric Rawn, Jingyi Li, Eric Paulos, Sarah Chasins

Quickpose is a version control system for Processing. It explores themes of material interaction, including (1) reciprocal discovery of goals and materials, (2) local knowledge of materials, and (3) annotation for holistic interpretation.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  CHI '23

Our four types of constraints demonstrated on various clothing and body parts--occlusion, at a single point, boundary, and overlapping region.

Automated accessory rigs for layered 2D character illustrations

Jingyi Li, Wilmot Li, Sean Follmer, Maneesh Agrawala

Introducing four types of constraints to automatically rig clothing and accessories to the body of 2D character, enabling further customizations (like shape changes) for mix-and-match characters beyond simply choosing accessories.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  UIST '21

A collection of artwork made by our interviewed artists.

What we can learn from visual artists about software development

Jingyi Li, Sonia Hashim, Jennifer Jacobs

A thematic analysis of interviews with 13 professional artists on why and how they choose to use (or not use) software in their work.

Paper (PDF)  /  CHI '21

DDB links visual inspectors in the drawing environment with numerical inspectors in the programming environment.

Supporting visual artists in programming through direct inspection and control of program execution

Jingyi Li, Joel Brandt, Radomír Měch, Maneesh Agrawala, Jennifer Jacobs

Helping manual artists understand and author programs with visual inspectors on their artwork, looping past inputs, and touching artwork to jump program state.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  CHI '20

A user double taps on a tactile sheet and hears our tool speak information about the layout element.

Editing spatial layouts through tactile templates for people with visual impairments

Jingyi Li, Son Kim, Joshua A. Miele, Maneesh Agrawala, Sean Follmer

An interactive, multimodal authoring tool that lets people who are blind or visually impaired understand and edit spatial layout structures.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  CHI '19

A multicolor large drawing fabricated on a CNC plotter.

Direct and immediate drawing with CNC machines

Jingyi Li, Jennifer Jacobs, Michelle Chang, Björn Hartmann

Exploring how to narrow the design-fabrication gap and combine manual art practice with digital fabrication through interactively controlling CNC machines.

Paper (PDF)  /  SCF '17

Two virtual agent avatars; one supposed to be friendly and the other assertive.

Confiding in and listening to virtual agents: the effect of personality

Jingyi Li, Michelle X. Zhou, Huahai Yang, Gloria Mark

A field deployment study on how the personalities of virtual agents affect user trust.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  IUI '17

Two game controllers, one made from clay and stickers and one 3D printed from the scanned clay model.

Makers' Marks: physical markup for designing and fabricating functional objects

Valkyrie Savage, Sean Follmer, Jingyi Li, Björn Hartmann

A fabrication pipeline for creating functional 3D printed objects from clay and stickers.

Details  /  Paper (PDF)  /  UIST '15

Teaching

Fall 2024

My office hours for Fall 2024 are Monday 4:00-5:30pm and Tuesday 10:30am-12:00pm in Edmunds 111. If you're a 5C student and would like to grab lunch, sign up with the link posted on my office door.

Projects

These are older non-research related—but still fun!—things.

A small cat like toy glowing blue. He likes you.

Mewsician

A musical friend to help children intrinsicly realize the joys of practicing.

Details  /  2016

A logo for adshirt.

AdShirt

Sell yourself. Make money.

Details  /  2016

Left, a selfie of the author. Right, the anime version of that selfie.

AniME

Automatically generating anime portraits.

Details  /  2015

The G-Pee-S logo, a location pin combined with a toilet.

G-Pee-S

An Android app for gender non-conforming folks and wheelchair users to locate nearby safe restrooms.

Details  /  2015

A pixel art logo for the game featuring a cute character.

Ultimate Star Collector: Winner of the Universe

A coming-of-age platformer made for the 2014 Queerness & Games conference. Click to play!

Details  /  2014

Personal

My hobbies include drawing, sewing, writing flash fiction, and participating in fandom, which I sometimes present academically. I grew up in a Southern Californian suburb and I grew up on the internet. My Chinese name is 李敬怡.

I was briefly a UI/UX designer at NVIDIA before I was a graduate student. I spent the majority of my Berkeley years living in cooperative student housing, where I contributed four murals to the walls of Cloyne Court.

My hair changes color often. If I'm not lazy about it, click here to see its current shade.