ABOUT
Parul Vora is a researcher, designer, artist, technologist and occasional educator that experiments in the intersection of design + technology in spatial, physical, social and visual interactive experiences. Pixels, volts and ideas are her raw materials; spaces, communities, hands, eyes, and ears are her test subjects; and aesthetics, novelty, humor, influence, and simplicity are her units of measurement.
She has studied at the d.school at Stanford University, the MIT Media Lab (MS in Media Arts and Sciences), Columbia University (visiting scholar), and UC-Berkeley (BA in Cognitive Science, minoring in Computer Science and Visual Studies). She is currently on a research grant at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to that she worked at yhaus (the design innovation team at Yahoo!), the mod lab (Yahoo! Research Berkeley), urban atmospheres (Intel Research Berkeley), Material Connexion, and EAR studio.
Her work attempts to leverage the social nature of visual media, shared public spaces, and communication to create participatory environments - augmenting an environment or its inhabitants to support a "dialogue" between them. Her projects promote creation of new content as well as the consumption of existing content that is designed to provoke the relationship between individuals, communities, and their architectures, considering the information technologies (from bluetooth to facebook) that are fundamentally reshaping that relationship. They employ a range of physical computing, information visualization, ubiquitous computing, and user research approaches and technologies that have resulted in tools, installations, displays interfaces, and visualizations - including but not limited to a gesture controlled video database that serves as a collective social memory, an open source mobile phone physical computing toolkit to promote participatory citizenship, a web and mobile tool for sharing and receiving event-based social media, and both large-scale and lo-fi information interfaces.
That being said, she never takes herself very seriously (even when talking in the third person) and has an affinity for photobooths, funiculars, swingsets, halloween, tri-color leds, klein bottles, nixie tubes, chaat, california produce and enjoys dance parties, playing practical jokes, Fishing with John (with the commentary), Jorge Borges stories, Tim Hawkinson's "Shrink", 69 Love Songs, the Pixies, summertime bike rides, nightswimming, and working in the shop.
CONTACT
parutron [at] thelaboratorium [dot] com