Week 4
Starting Off
Dr. Caspi returned, I continued to make progress on reading, and I had several interesting meetings this week!
Just Reading
I continued to take notes while doing my literature review. I finally finished screening the 1220 papers that had been returned from my search query and got about 30% of the way through the 260 I designated to read more in-depth.
Meetings
Saturday, 6/24: Chat with an Acquaintance from UNC
From my involvement with disability advocacy at UNC, I am acquainted with a man named Jordan Pleasant, who graduated last year with his master’s in City and Regional Planning in 2022. His thesis was about accessibility on historical college campuses, and he conducted an audit right at UNC. I reached out to him to talk about campus audits and any insights he may have on urban and regional planning and he sent me a copy of his thesis for me to read ahead of our meeting outside of work hours.
From our meeting, I learned about the design checklist UNC keeps regarding accessibility. More surprisingly, I also learned that the only thing they mention about disability in the master’s program is a single class session about paratransit. Given that digital accessibility is not mentioned in various CS core curriculums and accessibility and related matters is often absent from curricula of other areas of study (including medicine), perhaps I should be less surprised, but regardless, it is still concerning that we are sending out so many people without an awareness of designing for diverse populations, thus perpetuating the problem. I try to make people aware of the connections to combat this.
Monday, 6/26: Meeting my labmates
For the start of UW’s summer quarter, our lab gathered for the first time this summer in a Zoom room aptly titled “Transportation Data Equity Initiative Lab Meetings.” An AccessMap researcher named Edith Chung presented about her research into making AccessMap multimodal, and I learned about various (scientific) techniques employed in HCI, including tracing the user experience flow, customer journey map, affinity diagraming, and the design cycle. It made me realize just how little I know about design and helped me learn about how structures can guide the creative process. Later, there was dedicated time to discuss connections to our own research (past and present), so I made some suggestions about cost functions and provided some input based on my previous experience on mapping college campuses.
Tuesday, 6/27: Weekly Meeting with Dr. Caspi
Most of this meeting was spent discussing the research and my progress on the literature review; I won’t put the details here, but it was good as always to come away with a better view of the way ahead!
Thursday, 6/29: Meeting with a labmate, Cole Anderson
One of my fellow labmates has a physical disability, uses a wheelchair, and has prior experience regarding mapping accessibility on college campuses, like me. We met and discussed our personal experiences with accessibility on college campuses as well as our research work. It is great to be able to share and learn new perspectives!
Onwards
I’m flying to Seattle this coming Sunday to work in-person for the first time. I’ve made a list of people to meet from my lab and other labs when I get to Seattle and hope to see how UW’s campus architecture fares with accessibility! I hope to learn as much as I can while I’m there not only about research, but about living on my own in a new city.