Hi everyone! My name is Kai and I’m a junior at Wellesley College studying Media Arts and Sciences focusing on Human-Computer Interaction and UX Engineering. Before coming to Boston, I was raised between Jersey City, NJ and Harlem (NYC). I’m very passionate about both of these communities and how I can use my skills to improve the living situations in both of these cities.

In the past, I’ve worked mostly with app building and redesigning software for Rocket Software in Waltham last summer and Qila Energy, a biogas company, during my time abroad at UCL in London last semester. I will be continuing to develop these skills as a UX intern on the Audio Visual Engineering Architecture team at Apple this upcoming summer in Cupertino.

Some of my skills include UI/UX design, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Javascript, Python, prototyping, A/B and other usability testing. Civic media is something I’ve always been very passionate about. In the past, I’ve also been able to apply my skills to help develop a social mobile video app called DYNAMITE where users could feel safe anonymously posting videos (using face-blur technology and different types masks). However, after the introduction of the masks (of presidential candidates, animals, celebrities, etc.) the app turned into something mostly used for entertainment. More recently, I’ve been working with the S.A.F.E in Harlem coalition to create an app for their program which focuses on drug and alcohol prevention in African American teens and youth.

This is my first CMS course and I’m very excited to see what we can all accomplish during the semester!

Kai

I’m a member of Agaric, a worker-owned, cooperatively-run web development company which uses and contributes to Free Software, mostly Drupal and Django.  I’m not a designer and look forward to improving my design-writ-large skills in this course.  I am not an MIT student or alum, having attended the the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studying journalism, economics, political science, and information technology and never completing a thesis called “Economics for a Better World”.  Still want to.

Justice, liberty, and the self-organization we need for both drive me in most of my involvements, including the support authentic news, especially public interest sources, such as Boston Institute for Non-profit Journalism most recently.  I helped form a nonprofit organization called, by, and for, People Who Give a Damn.  Some time pretty soon PWGD will finally get around to building tools to give equal access to, and control of, communication to everybody.

I can be found online most places as mlncn.

Hi everyone! My name is Rachel and I’m a first-year Master’s student studying City Planning. I’m originally from a bedroom community of New York City, but I was living in San Francisco for several years before coming to MIT. I’ve shifted my focus a bit in the last year (which prompted the grad school decision), but I have long been interested in projects and organizations that sit at the intersection of technology and social justice.

Accordingly, I originally moved to the Bay Area after college to do AmeriCorps with a multinational nonprofit working to empower underserved communities through technology access, tools, and training. After a bit of bouncing around, I began working with an organization aimed at expanding the availability of high-speed internet in U.S. public schools to democratize access to digital learning tools, with a particular focus on improving outcomes for students in underperforming districts.

Ultimately I realized that my interests were leaning more towards issues of affordable housing, which is what my studies are now focused on, but I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to be involved in this class and to collaborate with such great partner organizations. I think that as we as a society begin to take better stock of what it means to be a valued employee with any shred of work-life balance, the co-op model will be gaining increasing traction as a more humane and sustainable economic model. Looking forward to working with you all!

Hi all!

My name is Val Healy, and I’m a senior here at MIT. I’m majoring in Comparative Media Studies and minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. Most of my research interests lie at the intersections of these two fields. Lately, I’ve been particularly interested in feminist technology studies’ co-constructive model of gender and technology, textile-based data visualization, feminist cyborg theory (Haraway), educational media programming, queer theory, and the study of niche online communities. In my spare time, I can be found knitting, drinking tea, volunteering at my favorite summer camp, and cuddling chickens.

I decided to take this class for several reasons. For one, civic media is what drew me to major in Comparative Media Studies, and I worked with the Center for Civic Media last summer. Second, I have lived in co-ops for around four years now, and I’m very interested in learning more about cooperative businesses. Third, I love project-based classes, and I’m excited for the opportunity to build something (open source!) that will be used for good in the “real” world.

As for my technical skills, I have some programming experience (Python, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript), some design experience, and lots of enthusiasm for learning new things!

Hi everyone,

I’m Allan, and I’m a first-semester junior studying Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Aero/Astro (Course 16). I’ve just returned from a semester on leave working for Amazon’s Prime Air project, helping develop drones to deliver packages. I have broad interests but most recently I’ve been thinking about:

• visualizing and representing data as art, in the process of “data play” (instead of “data science”)
• rejecting the idea of data as “objective”, and methods for better representing subjective data
• applying ethnographic practices to the study of online/mediated communities
• power tensions between media “producers” (film companies, authors, Facebook) and media “consumers” (fans, Facebook users), and what more equitable or democratically-governed media platforms might look like

Not to say I necessarily have anything knowledgeable to say about these topics, but these are some things that have been on my mind and which I want to learn more about. On the side, I blog for the MIT Admissions website, where you can find an account of my past work for Credit for Reddit (CMS.400) exploring the relationship between majors and identities within MIT undergraduates. I also sing a capella with the MIT/Wellesley Toons and play a role on the MIT Design/Build/Fly remote-control aircraft team, so if you ever need anyone to help you build an airplane, I’m your guy.

I’m excited to see where our work together this semester goes; I expect to be learning a lot from all of your different backgrounds and perspectives!

Hi Everyone!

My name is Maya and I’m a first-year Master’s Student in Comparative Media Studies. I grew up in LA (San Pedro, more specifically) and I’m trying to be more like my grandparents. 

Currently, I work in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab with Professor Fox Harrell, and am focusing on how the design of social network algorithms creates different affordances for different types of users, and more specifically how that process can lead to anti-black public spaces and/or generative political discourse.

My undergraduate degree is in American Studies, but I’ve also been trained as a User Experience designer and have worked as a UX Designer and Usability Researcher. When I was living in San Francisco, I helped organize Code for San Francisco, a volunteer civic technology group that worked to solve city problems with technology. I felt like most of the civic technology spaces I came across were strangely disconnected from community organizations and thus were limited in what problems they could solve and how inclusive they were able to be. I would like to try different approaches, such as codesign, to solving community/political problems with technology.

Looking forward to working with you all soon!

maya

Hi class! I am currently a first year student at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), working towards my Masters in City Planning degree.

I was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan and came to the U.S. about 8 years ago to attend Bennington College, a small liberal arts college in the middle of the mountains in Southern Vermont. At Bennington, I studied film and psychology. After graduation, I worked in various capacities with the Vera Institute of Justice, a national non-profit that focuses on criminal justice reform. Seeing the devastating impacts of the criminal justice on communities of color, and being frustrated with how late we were able to intervene in the lives of people for whom countless public systems had failed, I started to look for other answers. I joined DUSP to learn about solutions in housing, community and economic development that empower low income communities to work towards a more stable future and avoid involvement with punitive systems.

I am excited to be in this class to learn more about our partner organizations that are organizing themselves in innovative ways to build community wealth. I also look forward to working with students from other parts of MIT and beyond to support these organizations.

Insiyah Mohammad

Greetings,

My name is Jason Ma, I am a junior studying course 2A, mechanical engineering with some Robotic, Controls, and Computer Science thrown in there. I was originally from the Southern part of China outside of Guangzhou, but I move to Washington D.C / Maryland Area when I was 9 years old.

I wouldn’t consider myself a true designer; I see myself as a technologists at heart, and an engineer by trade. My skills are very interdisciplinary; I know a bit about computer science, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. I think design then connects all these skills together in utilizing them for a common purposes. One of my long term goal or careers is to place myself somewhere between technology and policy, bridging the two together. In order to achieve that, I realize I need to gain more of a perspective.I think this class will allow me to learn about the community and people aspect of the policy side of the problem, specifically how technology influences people or communities.

Much like Lucia, I am very involved in extracurricular. I am the director of a student group called TechX, a student group that empowers students through technology. We run HackMIT, MakeMIT, xFair, and ProjX etc. You can learn more here: http://techx.mit.edu/. Also, you can learn more about me at jsma.scripts.mit.edu.

Looking forward to a great semester!

Jason Ma