<aside> 💡 Adhiti is a senior majoring in Cognitive Psychology and HCI at CMU and minoring in Media Design through iDeATe. In the past, she’s been a UX Design Intern at Lucid, Pawgo, and Zemoso Technologies!

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Now, Let’s dive deeper into Adhiti’s journey through some of her projects and learn more about her!

💡 How did you first get involved in HCI?

💁🏻‍♀️: So freshman year, I was emailing a bunch of professors and just researching all the different programs that I knew we had. So I knew for a fact that the one thing I knew I wanted to do was IDeATe, and then I came across HCI, and it was kind of a really nice blend of all the different things I liked.

💁🏻‍♀️: It ended up being a really good fit for me, which I was really lucky with. So, then I just started doing more internships and connecting with older students to have coffee chats.

<aside> 🤩 Adhiti has been interested in art and design even before she entered college (you should see the way she designed her room — immaculate) as well as psychology, which she’s also majoring in, so she found that the perfect way to blend these interests was through HCI! And, she definitely doesn’t regret it!

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💡 What are some classes in HCI that really stood out to you?

Persuasive Design by Geoff Kaufman

💁🏻‍♀️: I think Persuasive Design was one of my favorite HCI courses - taught by Geoff Kaufman. Because I'm a psychology major, that was a really fantastic course for me to take because we do a lot of psychology work first and use that to form the design aspects, which is honestly a perfect blend of what I'm studying, because you don’t really get that with other projects or even internships in the industry, unless you're a UX researcher.

Information Design by Vicki Crowley

💁🏻‍♀️: Outside of HCI, I love all the IDeATe classes. I took information design with Vicki Crowley my sophomore year, and I'm TAing for that class now again, but she is just a fantastic professor, and it was just such a fun and engaging class. I had a really great team, and I also was able to learn a lot about visual design specifically, which is always a tough thing to learn and keep improving on. So any chance you get, it's good to practice.

Mediated Narrative by Ralph Vituccio

💁🏻‍♀️: So the prompt of the class is, what does the world look like in 2071, so we did a lot of discussions and our big project was to create some sort of like digital experience that conveys your vision, whatever that may be, so that was just like a very out there class, and I really liked it.

💡 Let’s dig deeper into the project you did in the Persuasive Design class! Can you elaborate on it a little?

📌 The Problem

💁🏻‍♀️: There were different topics our team could have chosen, and we chose student well-being because like COVID, that whole thing. So, our prompt was to use psychology to improve well being and we identified that social interaction was a big challenge. So, we targeted Carnegie Mellon, non-freshmen, to use technology to facilitate more natural social interactions. Because everything on Zoom is very scheduled and planned, there's no spontaneity. Like when you're in-person on campus, say, when you're walking around, you'll be saying hi to friends that you see sitting on the grass or passing by, and it's just like, the serendipity is gone. That makes up a lot of like our day, honestly.

✅ Their Solution