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Projects

A drawing of an green astronaut floating space with the text 'Astronaut Gadget Design Activity Box. Play, have fun, and invent.'
Astronauts' Gadgets: Co-design activity boxes with preschool-age children

With design activity boxes, I am working with young children to design and create novel family communications tools that they can use independently. I designed these activities from established teaching pedagogy in order to bring co-design games to young children and hear their ideas directly.

Regency dance card in form of an open fan with names written on each panel and a pencil attached by cord
Hybrid Working with Jane Austen

I am leading a cross-university team to design and develop new digital supports for hybrid work by drawing from art and fiction, starting with the novels of Jane Austen. Currently, my team is developing our first of these tools: a digital interpretation of “dance cards” from Regency balls.

Funded by a Sloan Foundation grant!
A family with young kids are gathered around a photo album
CrossRoads: Intergenerational Cultural Exchange

With this Magic Thing design study, I worked with immigrant grandparents and grandchildren to collaboratively design new magical supports for family knowledge transfer, focused on cultural exchange.

  • Selected Publications:
  • Liaqat, A., Axtell, B., & Munteanu, C. 2022. "With a hint she will remember": Collaborative Storytelling and Culture Sharing between Immigrant Grandparents and Grandchildren Via Magic Thing Designs. CSCW.
  • Liaqat, A., Axtell, B., & Munteanu, C. 2021. Participatory Design for Intergenerational Culture Exchange in Immigrant Families: How Collaborative Narration and Creation Fosters Democratic Engagement. CSCW.
A screenshot shows around 8 pictures in a rough grid and tilted to look spread out. The pictures show a tropical vacation: a sandcastle, a sunset over the ocean, a bonfire on the beach, a tropical breakfast, a resort pool with palm trees, and a blue sky with palm trees.
Album River: Digital Spaces for Social Picture Interactions

Across a range of mixed methods studies making up the bulk of my doctoral research, I explored the way current interactions with digital pictures limit social interactions that are traditionally supported with pictures, like sharing family histories. I led a variety of studies, including a contextual inquiry, a quantitative controlled study, and a theoretical perspective.

  • Selected Publications:
  • Axtell, B., Gong, E., & Munteanu, C. 2022. An Underdeveloped Metaphor: The Mismatched Designs and Motivations of Digital Picture Interactions. TOCHI Special Issue on (Re)Connecting History to the Theory and Praxis of HCI
  • Axtell, B., Saryazdi, R., & Munteanu, C. 2022. Design is Worth a Thousand Words: The Effect of Digital Interaction Design on Picture-Prompted Reminiscence. CHI.
  • Axtell, B. & Munteanu C. 2019. Back to Real Pictures: A Cross-generational Understanding of Users' Mental Models of Photo Cloud Storage. IMWUT.
A tablet resting on a table showing a page of text from Anne Of Green Gables. The first paragraph is highlighted in blue. The next sentence is highlighted in yellow and a hand is pointing at that sentence
ALLT Tablet (“Accessible, Large-print Listening and Talking”)

To support social reading in families, this tablet allows readers to easily follow along the text while reading aloud. The algorithm I designed for this project, aligned the speech of the recorded reading with the text for playback while recognizing natural variations in reading, that standard LLM tools consider to be errors.

  • Selected Publications:
  • Axtell, B., Munteanu, C., Demmans Epp, C., Aly, Y., & Rudzicz, F. 2018. Touch-Supported Voice Recording to Facilitate Forced Alignment of Text and Speech in an E-Reading Interface. IUI.
  • Demmans Epp, C., Munteanu, C., Axtell, B., Ravinthiran, K., Aly, Y., & Mansimov, E. 2017. Finger tracking: facilitating noncommercial content production for mobile e-reading applications. MobileHCI