I’m a computer science educator and
human-computer interaction researcher.
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.
An in-depth study on creative "misuse" through a 20 artist thematic analysis, which reveals that "misuse" and "use" are the same actions in practice, just under different cultural judgments and norms.
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?".
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.
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.
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.
A thematic analysis of interviews with 13 professional artists on why and how they choose to use (or not use) software in their work.
Helping manual artists understand and author programs with visual inspectors on their artwork, looping past inputs, and touching artwork to jump program state.
An interactive, multimodal authoring tool that lets people who are blind or visually impaired understand and edit spatial layout structures.
Exploring how to narrow the design-fabrication gap and combine manual art practice with digital fabrication through interactively controlling CNC machines.
A field deployment study on how the personalities of virtual agents affect user trust.
A fabrication pipeline for creating functional 3D printed objects from clay and stickers.
My office hours for Spring 2025 are Tuesdays 11am-12pm, Wednesdays 4-5pm, and Thursdays 1-2pm 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.
These are older non-research related—but still fun!—things.
A musical friend to help children intrinsicly realize the joys of practicing.
Sell yourself. Make money.
Automatically generating anime portraits.
An Android app for gender non-conforming folks and wheelchair users to locate nearby safe restrooms.
A coming-of-age platformer made for the 2014 Queerness & Games conference. Click to play!
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.