Dhruv Jain

Info
djain@mit.edu
dhruvjain.info
MIT Media Lab, Speech and Mobility / MS1

Expertise
★★  Fabrication & Craft
★  Design
★★★★★  Electronics
★★★★★ Programming
★★★ Psychology
★★★ Sociology

What’s your favorite thing you’ve made?
I have made an Indoor Navigation System for the visually impaired. Here’s an abstract from a recently accepted paper:

One of the common problems faced by visually impaired people is of independent path-based mobility in an unfamiliar indoor environment. Existing systems do not provide active guidance or are bulky, expensive and hence are not socially apt. In this paper, we present the design of an omnipresent cellphone based active indoor wayfinding system for the visually impaired. Our system provides step-by-step directions to the destination from any location in the building using minimal additional infrastructure. The carefully calibrated audio, vibration instructions and the small wearable device helps the user to navigate efficiently and unobtrusively. Results from a needs finding study with five visually impaired individuals informed the design of the system. We then deployed the system in a building and field tested it with ten visually impaired users using a before-and-after study. The comparison of the quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated that the system is useful and usable, but can still be improved.

The system is currently undergoing installations in public museums in India. We have pilot tested it in 3 museums in Delhi.

Accessibility is the area I am really motivated about, and as you can see from my portfolio, I have worked on a couple of projects related to improving communication and mobility for people with disabilities.

What’s the most frustrating object you’ve used?
The “treadmill” in my dorm while interning at University of Maryland, Summer 2014 (Name of the company not disclosed).

In my opinion, it had a very bad user interface. It was really hard to locate the buttons to start, stop, set mode etc.

I believe there were 3 problems with it:
1. Color contrast not set properly: Most of the white text was on a light grey background and was not legible
2. Visual representation of features were not intuitive: The pictures of start, stop, heart beat were hard to visualize.
3. The display board was not easy to reach: The display and configuration board was very low in height and was not properly aligned in the correct direction, for the user to be able to comfortably operate it.

What do you personally hope to get out of this class?
There are three things I would like to learn in this class:

1. Design: How to effectively prototype, design and present your product so that is compelling.

2. Vision based research: I am awed by Tangible Media’s theory of Tangible Bits and Radical Atoms. The drive towards the “Material User Interface” is fascinating and it would be good to develop my mind to think and act in that way. What if we could make a material that changes shape and sends a response as we touch it, so as to completely diminish the boundary between digital and physical? What if we could make a tablet (I would like to call it “Aqualet” or “Viscouslet”) in which instead of just touching, you could literary put your hand inside the screen (analogous to aqueous liquid) and grab and feel the texture of Desktop icons, word documents, and feeling them as you manually enlarge/shrunken or delete them? These are some of the research questions that interest me.

3. Incorporating the elements of sociology and psychology into technological design and development: Most of my past work in HCI and deployment has been evident of large scale user study designs, testing, iterating and incorporating the elements of human behavior and preference into hardware and software development. I would like to continue the same here too in a vision based way. As I gathered from the course website, Tangible Media (and Tangible Interfaces course) has incorporated such elements into its design and development (for example, Carl Jung’s archetypes, the iceberg phenomena) and it would be worthwhile for me to continue my thinking in that direction.

How can you contribute to the class?
I can contribute to the class and my project team with my knowledge in the areas of Electronics, Programming, Psychology and Sociology to create a seamless Material User Interface.