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about me

I’m a PhD candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. I work in the Work2Play lab with Professor Beki Grinter. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, I completed my MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. I’m originally from South Africa, a beautiful and diverse country in the Global South. If you’re interested in finding out more about my friends, family and adventures in the States, check out my flickr page.

My research focuses on how people use and manage various domestic infrastructures in their homes. For my dissertation, I examine household routines around and resources invested in managing complicated networking equipment, such as computers, modems, routers and their many wired or wireless interconnections.

In my completed empirical studies, I discovered that there is a lot of information about the home network that may help household members better understand and engage with network tasks. However, much of this information is only available through tools developed for very technically knowledgeable people, even though it may be of interest to all household members. Further, network usage information for all the home computers is not always available in a central location or presented in accessible terms e.g., showing a timeline of events or displaying information in non-technical terms.

Currently, I’m developing Kermit, a technology probe to make more information about home network usage patterns available and visible to household members in real time. Kermit’s goal is to surface information about bandwidth usage, network traffic patterns and who is online when, to stimulate household reflection on routines and resources related to this infrastructure. At a broader level, I want to determine how making the home network more “inspectable”, (by showing real time usage information to household members) affects perceptions of the infrastructure, behaviors around networking tasks and levels of technical agency with respect to the network.

Apart from my dissertation work, I am also interested in how HCI can help create sustainable technologies and encourage “green” collective action for conserving resources. In prior work, I conducted HCI4D research in South Africa and I continue to be interested in the development of this field.