MaryEtta West

  • PhD Student
  • COMPUTER SCIENCE

Mary Etta West is an electrical design engineer crafting experimental technologiesfor applications in computing education, wearables and robotics. Sheis from Las Vegas, Nevada,where she earned a Bachelorof Science in electrical engineering, and then went on to design products and tools, and to createresources for the world's largest solar plant: Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System as well as forSparkFun Electronics and Boulder Engineering Studio. Mary's current research explores equality, equityand identity expression in tech and maker culture. She is a first-year computer sciencePhD student working with the VisuaLab, the Laboratory for Playful Computationand the Human Interaction and Robotics (HIRO) Group. Mary is advised byDanielle Szafir,Joel SwansonandBen Shapiro.

Opaletta is a line of electronic and programmable jewelry currently in development with her design company OubliettaElectronics. She believes electronics could bemorewearable and fashionable and extend the possibilities for self-exploration and identity expression. She is driven to accomplish this not only with jewelry but with MR/AR, connected and programmable clothing, closet management, garment selectionand fabric manipulation. When Mary isn't printing PCBs or experimenting with new materials, she can be found in Stardew Valley.

Publications

  • Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez,Netta Ofer,Shanel Wu,Mary Etta West,Mirela AlistarandLaura Devendorf.2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. InDesigning Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529.(June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia).
  • S. Sandra Bae,Clement Zheng,Mary Etta West,Ellen Yi-Luen Do,Samuel Huron,Danielle Albers Szafir(2022). "Making Data Tangible: A Cross-disciplinary Design Space for Data Physicalization." Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. (April 30 - May 5, 2022—New Orleans, USA.) , see video, and short presentation.
  • W. Payne, Y. Bergner,M. West,C. Charp, R. B. Shapiro,D. Albers Szafir, E. Taylor, & K. DesPortes. 2021. danceON: Culturally Responsive Creative Computing for Data Literacy. (to appear) InProceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021)/Yokohama, Japan–May 8-13, 2021)[Best Paper Honorable Mention]. DOI:.
  • Annie Kelly,Christine Chang,ChrisHill, Mary West,Mary Yoder, Joseph Polman, Shaun Kane, Michael Eisenberg, and R. Benjamin Shapiro. 2020. “Our Dog Probably ThinksChristmas Is Really Boring”: Re-mediating Science Education for Feminist-inspired Inquiry.ICLS 2020: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of the Learning Sciences.10.22318/icls2020.935 (Nashville, Tennessee (virtual)–June 19-23 2020).
  • S. Sandra Bae and Mary Etta West. 2021. Cyborg Crafts: Second SKIN (Soft Keen INteraction). In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 87, 1–3. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3444705 (Salzburg, Austria (virtual) Feb. 14-19, 2021).