In the Loop: Megan Halpern

Designing for collaboration: Fostering strong, positive, and fun collaborative experiences 

Researchers, designers, and, in fact, most professionals find we are increasingly asked to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams, often consisting of members who have little experience with one another’s fields. How do we begin these collaborative relationships? Megan Halpern discusses methods of facilitating rewarding collaborations through boundary probes, or collaborative probes. Megan will discuss the design lineage of these prompt-oriented collaborative tools as well as cases in which such tools have been used to create performances and to design. Megan will also lead a hands-on mini-workshop on creating and using boundary probes. 

About Megan 

Megan Halpern is a PhD candidate in communication at Cornell University. Her research interests include the intersection of art and science and the relationship between experts and the public in both art and science, as well as human-computer interaction design. Her current dissertation work focuses on audience participation as a lens for examining the relationship between experts and publics. Case studies include collaboratively created science performances as well as mobile technologies for participation in lectures, performances, and at museums. Megan has also explored mobile application design at Cornell’s Interaction Design Lab, where she led several projects, including SunDial, a geocaching adventure around Ithaca’s Sciencenter, and MoBoogie, an app that fosters creative expression through movement. Megan is an experienced science theater producer, having created shows for schools and for New York theaters (including collaborations with Carl Djerassi, an inventor of the birth control pill and now a leading proponent of “science in fiction”). She is the co-founder of Redshift Productions, a company that creates science performances and works with artists and scientists to create new forms of scientific outreach.