Mission Statement

We are a research group at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. We study and design interactive technologies, games, and social computing systems to empower transformative experiences for individuals and their communities. Our cross-disciplinary approach blends theories and methods from psychology, design, and computer science. We seek to reimagine technologies and systems that promote empathy, self-expression, agency, and joy, especially for historically marginalized groups. We believe that new technologies, when designed with both mind and heart, can improve communication, collaboration, and conscientiousness. Playful technologies engage hearts and minds, preserve a sense of delight, and afford new ways of expressing ourselves and interacting with others.

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People

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Geoff Kaufman

Principal Investigator

Geoff Kaufman is the founder of the eHeart Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in social psychology from Ohio State University, and a B.A. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the faculty in the HCII in 2015, Geoff was a postdoctoral researcher at Tiltfactor, a game design and research laboratory at Dartmouth College. His primary research focuses on how experience-taking - the mental simulation of characters experiences in fictional narratives, virtual worlds, or games - can change individuals' self-concepts, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. This work has led to new insights regarding user-specific, design-specific, and situational variables that increase the impact of stories, games, and mediated interactions, and a set of empirically validated techniques and best practices for the creation of playful interventions for social change. His personal 500+ board game collection both informs and provides a regular distraction from his academic pursuits.

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Adinawa Adjagbodjou

PhD Student

Adinawa researches equitable and context-driven approaches for designing and evaluating emerging AI technologies to better support minoritized communities. She utilizes participatory, mixed-methods and research-through-design methodologies to contribute novel artifacts and empirical understanding of users. She previously received her BA in Economics and Computer Science at Harvard University. Outside of lab, she loves playing volleyball, hosting dinner with friends, and enjoying the performing arts!

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Morgan Evans

PhD Student

Morgan works on the design and evaluation of transformational game experiences. Her current research seeks to empower members of historically marginalized communities. In the past, she was a privacy researcher and earned a BA from Bard College. She loves to sing and spend time on skateboards and slacklines!

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Lisa Egede

PhD Student

Lisa's work centers on understanding experiences minoritized communities face when interacting with technology and co-designing with these communities to generate solutions. Her current work aims to understand how educators and creators utilize technology to teach about racially sensitive topics. Lisa graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in computer science. In her free time she enjoys making Spotify playlists, watching reality TV and riding her bike!

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Pranav Khadpe

PhD Student

Pranav combines system-building, empirical methods, and theoretical approaches to study, design and build design participation architectures for internet-based collaboration efforts like Wikipedia and Open source projects. By doing so, he seek to understand how we might architect production efforts that become arenas for collective creativity, self-development, and co-creation and sharing of value. He graduated from IIT Kharagpur with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Electrical Engineering. Outside of work, he likes running, boardgames, and good satire.

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Erica Principe Cruz

PhD Student

Erica is an ARCS Scholar, Generation Google Women in Gaming Scholar, and PhD Student at the CTP and HCII of CMU. She studies how digital games and immersive technology experiences can be designed to uplift marginalized communities by centering their joy, rest, and healing. When she's not doing research or playing games, she is going on adventures with her dog and doing her best on a skateboard.

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Kaycee Stiemke

PhD Student

Kaycee’s research explores how people connect with fictional narratives and characters in digital media. She is especially interested in designing self-expression tools that capture the intersectional experiences of users and enhance feelings of emotional well-being. Previously, she worked as a social media researcher and received her B.S. in Cognitive Science from UCLA. In her free time, she likes playing video games and reading webcomics.

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Kimi Wenzel

PhD Student

Kimi studies users' psychological responses to AI bias, and creates design interventions to remediate AI harms. She earned her B.A. from Columbia University, Barnard College. Outside of the lab, she loves cooking, practicing yoga, and writing.

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Indiana (Indy) Principe Cruz

PhD Student

Indy is a Human-Canine Interaction PhD student at eHeart. He studies pawsitive strategies for gifting joy, rest, and healing to all living beings via play. He is a highly decorated Best Boy. When he is not doing research, Indy is making the most of life with his favorite human research collaborator Erica.

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George Wenzel

PhD Student

George is a Human-Cat Interaction PhD student. He specializes in purr-suasive design strategies to help hoomans be better humans. He is currently developing a theory which correlates the amount of floof one has to their purr-suit of knowledge.

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Baxter Kaufman

Affiliate

Baxter is a proud graduate of Meow.I.T. and an expert in fostering meaningful human-cat interactions. In his spare time, he enjoys watching tennis, spending quality time with his catnip banana, and running up and down the stairs of his house (often at odd hours of the night) to stay active and alert.

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Roger Kaufman

Affiliate

Roger is an alum of Carnegie Meowin’ and a true meditation master, having perfected the ability to achieve zen-like states (especially when staring out at the backyard). His hobbies include cabinet climbing and rhythmic gymnastics, and he aspires to one day reach the heights of the ivory cat tower.

Active Projects

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Art across Realities at the Pop District

Erica Principe Cruz, Jessica Hammer, Geoff Kaufman

We are iteratively prototyping a virtual immersive gallery at the Andy Warhol Museum Pop District, informed by the community-centric vision of marginalized Pittsburgh artists. Through this we explore how XR technologies can transform the future of art spaces in the emerging metaverse and how they can support new forms of communal joy, e.g. enjoying art across realities. As the metaverse emerges, we have the unique opportunity to shape spaces for art in ways that are only possible with XR, with a special emphasis on centering community and marginalized individuals in their design, development, and evaluation. Starting here, we can work together towards a more inclusive metaverse that includes uplifting marginalized artists and their work as a standard.

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Counterspace Games for BIWOC STEM Students

Erica Principe Cruz, Jessica Hammer, Geoff Kaufman

Counterspace is an exploratory research project that explores how to create digital games that function as counterspaces for Black, Indigenous, and other Women of Color (BIWOC) studying STEM. BIWOC are underrepresented in STEM, and as such, they often feel a weaker sense of belonging and face higher rates of attrition. This project aims to help combat dominant STEM culture by playfully cultivating a sense of belonging and persistence through digital game design and playful interactions.

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Tech4BlackLives Project

Lisa Egede, Dr. Denae Ford Robinson, Dr. Brittany Johnson, Dr. Christina Harrington, Leslie Coney

The purpose of this project is to understand how Black and ally software developers, technologists, and community organizers have used, created, or curated resources to support the experiences of Black people. By using a mixed methodology approach of semi-structured interviews, surveys, and quantitative analysis, we seek to understand the motivations behind building these resources and tools, its impact on the community, and where there may be opportunities for how this specific group can be supported. Our goal is to understand and effectively communicate the impact this group of technologists has had on society.

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Designing Social Virtual Reality Experiences for Language Learning

Adinawa Adjagbodjou, Yvie Zhang, Ashley Sanchez, Evolone Layne, Mandy Pan, Lanning Zhang, Chaco Iwase, Alex Chung, Geoff Kaufman

This project investigates how new support tools can be designed to better meet the goals of language learners. Through an interactive process involving language learner insights, we develop and evaluate Virtual Reality (VR) experiences that emphasize emotional and affective support.

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Envisioning Support-Centered Technologies for Immigrant Language Learners: Needs and Design Opportunities

Adinawa Adjagbodjou, Lily Madojemu, Geoff Kaufman

In this work, we conduct a qualitative interview study to explore the use of support tools to facilitate participation in daily life for ELLs, investigating the efficacy of these tools, obstacles encountered, and perceptions of what defines positive and negative experiences. Our work reveals 5 contexts in which language learners require additional socio-technical tools for support and we present a set of 8 actionable design guidelines for designers working with ELLs that prioritize their linguistic, affective, and social needs.

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Nooks

Shreya Bali, Pranav Khadpe, Geoff Kaufman, Chinmay Kulkarni

Nooks is a Slack App designed to help people form lasting connections, across their organization. Nooks achieves this by allowing people to "bump into" like-minded people regularly, by providing them tools to spark and join conversations around topics of shared interested

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AI's Impact on Communication and Impression Formation

Pranav Khadpe, Kimi Wenzel, Chinmay Kulkarni, Geoff Kaufman

How do AI communication tools like auto-reply, AI-assisted message writing, and AI revisions impact individuals' value judgements of one another? Through a series of experiments, we investigate how AI-mediated communication impacts users' relationships and impression formation.

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Redesigning Generative AI for Diverse Users

Kimi Wenzel, Laura Dabbish, Geoff Kaufman

We are running studies to understand how marginalized users react to instances of bias in generative AI -- What are their mental models of how genAI works? What are the psychological ramifications of being exposed to genAI bias? We will use this information to redesign genAI UI to better serve diverse users.

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Designing Interventions for Bias in Language Technologies

Kimi Wenzel and Geoff Kaufman

Language technologies have demonstrated a consistent bias against users of various vernaculars and accents. While some researchers are working to improve the diversity of the datasets that language models are trained on, and others are working to improve language models themselves, we take a different approach and focus on embedding healing and uplifting designs into langauge technology interfaces.