Peer-reviewed publications
Social Legibility in Experiential Design: Perception Gaps, Shared Space, and Collective Action
Why do visitors who agree with an exhibit’s message still fail to act on it? This paper introduces social legibility — how visible a room’s shared beliefs are to the people standing in it — as a design consideration distinct from persuasion. Grounded in a year-long study with the Yale Peabody Museum and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, it found that visitors shown evidence of shared concern before being asked to act were more than 2.5 times as likely to take that action, with no change in their underlying attitudes. This work underlies the audience-research behind our environmental communication practice. Read the paper
Using Social Science to Improve Social Impact: Communication Strategies for Experience Designers
Experience designers are increasingly asked to change minds and drive collective action on issues like climate change — but design instinct alone rarely tells you which message will land with which audience. Drawing on the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s segmentation research, this paper lays out how experience designers can use social-science audience segmentation to shape strategic communication for social-impact work, rather than treating persuasion as a one-size-fits-all creative problem. Read the paper
An Aquarium of Machines: A Physically Realized Artificial Life Simulation
How do you make machine intelligence something the public can stand inside of? For Anicka Yi’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, we built an artificial-life system of autonomous aerial machines — each composing its behavior from goal-directed instincts, with parameters mapped to personality traits so every machine decided, moved, and responded as an individual. The paper documents the simulation architecture and what it took to run genuinely autonomous behavior continuously, in public, for four months. This work underlies the behavioral-modeling capability in our discipline. Read the paper & companion talk · ACM Digital Library
Technical reports
Beyond the peer-reviewed record, we publish our internal research and technical reports so clients and peers can check our claims. These haven’t gone through external peer review — they’re our own studies, written up in full and made public.
Designing NFC Interactions for the Public
Best practices for instructing first-time users of embedded NFC smart objects, drawn from the published HCI literature and a two-round usability study on the Dana-Farber zebrafish display’s NFC retrofit — where written instructions alone produced zero unaided successes, and showing the gesture as motion took four of five. Read the report
Modelling Autonomous Agent Psychology Using Personality Traits
A companion report to An Aquarium of Machines, documenting how each Aerobe’s individual behavior is generated by coupling the five-factor (OCEAN) personality model to its low-level motion parameters. Read the report
Teaching Tiktaalik: Comparing Interactive and Narrated Formats for a Museum Exhibit
A usability study at the Yale Peabody Museum comparing a narrated video against a self-guided interactive kiosk teaching the same content about Tiktaalik, the fossil animal that bridges fish and land vertebrates — and what each format made easy, and hard, to understand. Read the report
Investigating the Climate Perception Gap Through Interactive Design
The full study behind Social Legibility in Experiential Design: 962 visitor sessions at the Yale Peabody Museum testing whether closing the gap between what visitors privately believe and what they think their neighbors believe changes what visitors actually do. Read the report
Forthcoming
We currently have additional work under peer review on accessibility and adaptive narrative systems, plus ongoing research into evidentiary drift in the experience economy.