Eva Philips

This project began with my long lasting passion for organization, tracking, and the search for better work habits.  Most would consider me a very organized person in both my personal and work life. While this is generally a positive aspect of my personality there are consequences that come with this life style.  Often work and organization can overwhelm my world such that my push toward getting a specific task done inhibits my focus on other equally important tasks.  For this reason, I have been hesitant to implement tracking apps in the past.  I am worried that the heightened awareness that comes with tracking apps would amplify the narrow focus I tend to get stuck in?  

In order to explore what I do and do not like about tracking apps that aim to help your work habits I implemented a few into my life.  Two of these apps included the Reporter App and Toggl.  The Reporter App is a customizable survey app that randomly asks you questions about your day.  The app stores your answers into simple visualizations and helps you keep a record/journal of random variables throughout your day.  This app does a wonderful job of helping you to note important aspects of your day that may contribute to your work habits.  However, I found the randomization of the surveys to be very distracting when I was working.  Often, when I was in the middle of a work session, a notification would pop up on my phone to tell me that it was time to “report”.  Most of the time I would find myself ignoring the notification in order not to break up my work session.  Then after the work session I would notice the notification again and continued to ignore it since I was not working and the answers would not be applicable.  What I liked about the Reporter app however, was the simple and immediate opportunity to analyze your answers.  Overall I had a much more positive experience with the Toggl app.  I used the Toggl app to track my work sessions throughout the semester.  If I was doing homework for one class I would start and stop a timer at the beginning and end of the work session, respectively.  Now I have a very comprehensive timeline of how much time I spend on each class.  I found this app very easy to use and so quick to implement that it barely creeped into my work sessions.  Still however, I had a weird feeling that tracking my time for each class and noting that timing in the moment was motivating my work in negative ways.  Noting the time ticking by instead of focusing on the task at hand is a common result of time tracking and I often find myself doing just that.  Of course, having the data after the fact has been interesting to analyze and motivates changes in my work habits. 

My aim for this project was to think critically about how a mobile application could benefit or harm your work habits.  Ultimately, I tried to design and build an application that took all of the positive aspects of tracking apps but eliminated the negative effects that they can have on work habits in particular. 

This project served as a final project for my Quantified Humanist and Mobile Lab Classes. The design, concept, and backend was built for the Quantified Humanist class and the app execution was built for the Mobile Lab class. For a more detailed description of the Zone App and the development process please visit my Mobile Lab and Quantified Humanist blogs.

Through a class at ITP called 100 Days of Making I completed a project called “100 days of analog food porn.” Every day for 100 days I drew an image of food and posted it to social media. As a result of this iterative project I now have a large collection of my food drawings. Along the way I learned the power of iteration, focus, and routine.

Click here to see the entire collection of drawings.

One in five people have a language based learning disability, the most common of which is dyslexia. However, most of the population, even some dyslexics themselves, misunderstand the disability completely. Dyslexia effects the part of the brain that processes language and thus, most dyslexics have difficulty decoding sounds and relating them to letters. This slows their reading rate and makes spelling a challenge. A Dyslexic’s Experience is a project designed for anyone to understand this language processing barrier first hand. Throughout the interaction the user will learn and spell words using a visual representation of the alphabet designed by measuring the volume inputs of spoken letters and drawing circles with radii based on that input. The barrier between the user and this new alphabet is meant to recreate the challenges individuals with learning disabilities face. When the user scans a symbol from the visual alphabet in the ‘learn’ section of the board, the corresponding letter will play over the headphones. Requiring the users to learn the alphabet by matching the oral sounds of letters to the symbols is meant to highlight the difficulty dyslexics have decoding sounds. Once the user learns enough letters to make a word, they will scan the letters one at a time in the ‘write’ section of the board. As they scan, their word will be displayed on the screen and they can submit it into the library of words written by previous users. The symbols that make up the alphabet are purposely similar yet unique in order to make the interaction somewhat challenging. In conclusion, the user will gain a first hand experience of a dyslexic’s learning differences.

This project was exhibited in the ITP 2018 Winter Show.

For a more detailed look at this project visit this site.

For an assignment for my Collective Narrative class at ITP I created a multi narrative podcast. I interviewed three of my family members and asked them to tell me the same story of how my parents got their marriage license. I chose this story because it was one that has been repeated in my household growing up. I think it is interesting how my siblings and I have taken the stories that my parents have shared with us and made them our own. I wanted to test how the validity of these stories would hold across generations. Thus, I separately interviewed my dad, mom and sister and then compiled the interviews together into one cohesive story.

To hear the podcast view this link

(podcast song reference)

Using the laser cutter I made these coasters out of thin plywood. Each coaster consists of a patterned base and two rings. Once the pieces were glued together the rings acted as a rim for the coasters. The patterns were based off of ones I found online and were redrawn in illustrator.

I have always loved to cook and bake.  Over the years, I turned my passion into a business, creating personalized cakes and cupcakes for any occasion.  Here are some sample treats that I made…

For one of my final ITP projects, I decided to use data visualizations to explore what happened in the 2016 US presidential election.  As the project progressed, the motivation became one that would inform readers about our election process and why we should care. The webpage follows the votes in the 2016 elections and tells the story of how and why some voices get eliminated in the process.  Toward the end, the visualizations get manipulated in order to explore faults in our electoral college system.  Hopefully, this webpage will inform the uninformed and empower everyone to care about future elections.

To visit the webpage click here.

For a more in detailed look at this project visit the ICM blog.

This is a basic concept for a waste tracking app I built using Swift. The app would help the user track the type of waste they are removing from their household. This may give them a better grasp of the amount/type of waste they produce. While building this app I focused on using animations to improve the user experience.

The code for this example can be found here.

Using concepts from my Nature of Code class, I created these particle experiments.

You can view the Particle Population Tracking example here and find the code here.

Using concepts from my Nature of Code class, I created this oscillating pattern that grows and shrinks. I imagine this as an alternative to the pattern that appears in the Apple watch Breathe app.

You can view this example here and find the code here.

For my first JavaScript sketch I developed an elephant out of triangle elements.  Elephants are my favorite animal and the mascot of Tufts University, where I got my undergraduate degree.  This sketch highlighted the triangle() function and RGB color system. The following images show my processes.

A classmate and I designed and built this interactive moon animation. We loaded images of the moon phases into our p5.js sketch and mapped each image to a different slider range. We plan to continue this project by adding more sliders in order to allow the user to manipulate the night sky and the stars independent of the moon phase.

For this project, I worked with a partner to develop a Halloween game controlled by two knobs. When you win the game, the skull dispenses candy. The following images and videos show the results of this project. The Arduino and javaScript code can be found at these links. For a more in depth look at the process, visit this blog post.

Using vectors and forces I created this repelling field with p5.js. When you move your mouse through the field the particles flee the mouse. This project was one example from a series of particle/system experiments I completed for my Nature of Code class.

You can find this example here and the code here.

During my first semester at ITP, I was in a class called Visual Language. In this class we explored many types of graphic and visual design. One week we were asked to develop a series of expressive words. Here are some of the sample words that I developed during this exploration.

This project was inspired by the work of David Roy, a kinetic sculpture artist who works primarily with wood. I was particularly drawn to David’s Deja Vu project which uses a simple pattern to create the illusion of growing and shrinking flowers. I decided to use a motor to experiment with a similar pattern. The result of this experiment is shown in the following images. In the future I would like to create some sort of wall with many flowers and incorporate an interactive component in order for someone to control the growing and shrinking of the pattern. The Arduino and javaScript code for this project can be found at these links.

This key holder hands on the wall and has an embedded magnet. When keys are placed on it, the magnet holds the keys and the keys look like they are floating. I used the ITP shop to design and construct these key holders. This project served as a great project to help me learn how to use new power tools. I used various techniques during the process to get repeatable results so that I could make many, identical key holders.

I spent the summer of 2018 working with a team of designers, engineers, and tinkerers at Teknikio. Teknikio develops electronic boards that can be embed into craft projects and provides an educational STEM tool for children. At Teknikio I helped to develop educational packages for STEM based programs in school, camps and makerspaces. I also designed and built electronic store displays and new sample activities for the company. Here are some projects I worked on along the way.