I’m Arvind, currently a Research Assistant at UMD, writing this letter to express about myself to you.
Please feel free to tap any highlighted content for a bit more insight on them.
Growing up in a creative household, art was the first form of expression I used to make sense of this world. However, after participating in a couple of competitions during high school, I realized that people usually liked what they wanted to see. This made me contemplate ways to create something that was not limited by interpretation.
Programming became my following tool of choice, and with every software I built, tools became less significant, while developing models and infrastructures for data became the primary focus. As the fog around the inner workings of computers began to dissipate during my undergraduate studies, my focus shifted from developing user interfaces to researching usage patterns and behaviours and designing alternate experiences around them.
Motivated to achieve a deeper understanding of the Human-Computer Interaction paradigm, I looked forward to learning from the place where it all began: the University of Maryland. Little did I know the impressions I would imbibe at this place would change the trajectory of my life.
During my journey, Contextual Inquiry, Usability Testing, and Heuristic Evaluation got added to my repertoire. I applied these to capture the mismatches in expectations across different levels of the advising workflow at iSchool and redesign the experiences of advisors and students. In addition, my experiences as an alpha tester for products like Fermat 🔗 enabled me to understand and practice these skills in the real world.
During this time, I had the oppurtunity to participate in a conference on Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines and present a poster at IEEE VIS based on my work with Dr. Niklas Elmqvist 🔗 on visualizing tennis games through court-based visualizations from open-source data. The convergence of perspectives from academia and the industry I experienced at these conferences strengthened my resolve to become an industry researcher.
As a Graduate Research Assistant at the OASIS Lab, I designed and developed multiple prototypes for a sociotechnical system that aimed to connect people through analogical sensemaking, supervised by Dr. Joel Chan 🔗. During this time, I also participated and assisted in the piloting and qualitative coding process of experiments on Computational Analogies.
As a part of my Masters Thesis (titled Computational Support for Analogical Innovation), I had the opportunity to apply my HCI skills in an experimental setting. Through involved analysis of interviews, usage patterns and behaviors of over 24 participants across demographies, I explored how experiences could be designed for users to effectively identify, select and use potential leads that span across different domains and disciplines for solving their design problems.
As a contributor to the open-source community, I created tools that made the process of working with colors more accessible for developers. One of my notable contributions is Matercolor 🔗 (59K downloads) and its Figma plugin 🔗 (6.8K downloads), which helps developers easily generate accessible color palettes for their designs. Another tool I created is Chromanomer 🔗 (400+ downloads), which is designed to help developers easily identify and name colors using human-friendly names, making it easier to remember and use colors consistently across projects. In addition to creating tools, I have also contributed to repositories like benbrigell.design 🔗, to document design principles.
I started my design career at CuedIn Technologies, where I worked on UX, branding, and marketing design. I designed a virtual mobile shopping experience for local users, a single page dashboard for vendors and a conversational interface for ordering groceries. As a remote intern at Tetrate, I experienced the true scale and potential of enterprise-grade applications, contributing to a variety of exciting projects including a proof-of-concept for a configurable viewer of Service Mesh Metrics.
I am at the cusp of completing my Masters, with a dream of contributing to the industry as an industry researcher under a suitable guidance and mentorship. I do not see a better mentor than Dr. Ferraiolo to take me through this journey!
Thanks a lot for your time to read till here.
I can be reached at arvind@cheenu.net and +1 (240) 726 8257
Thanks and regards,
Arvind Srinivasan