Larssen, Astrid Twenebowa (PhD)

Assistant Professor

Course(s) Taught: Human Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, Design

Qualifications: Ph.D. in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design and Human Practices Lab at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

M.A., Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

B.A., Chemistry, Augsburg College, MN, USA

Status: Full Time

Research Interests and Research Activities

• Human-computer interaction and interaction design
• Movement understanding as a "design sens-ability" in interaction design
• Everyday mobile technology use practices in emerging economies
• Female participation in CS education and in the CS profession
• Teaching as facilitation, Teaching reflective practitioners

Projects

• Movement‐based interaction - Azonto for touchscreen and Kinect
  Turning the popular Ghanaian dance, Azonto, into an an engaging game for touchscreen devices and the Kinect. The project also involves developing a methodology for extracting the understandings we need to accomplish this.
• Everyday mobile use practices in emerging economies
  In this project we engage with people to understand their everyday mobile use practices to improve the usefulness and user experience of technology in emerging economies.
• ICT with or without the "D"?
  Dr. G. Ayorkor Korsah and I contribute to the ongoing discourse in the area of "Information and communcation technology and development", questioning the need for an excplicit focus on the "D" and providing insights on educating technologist from within a "developing" context.
• Social media in Ashesi's lecturehalls
  Kajsa Hallberg Adu (Dept of Arts and Sciences) and I are experimenting with and evaluating different uses of social media in the courses we and other Ashesi lecturers teach.

Selected Presentations and Other Professional Activities

• Panel organizer with Dr. G. Ayorkor Korsah at ICTD 2012, March 2012.
• Invited panelist Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 2011.
• Trainer user experience and user interface module at Mobile Web Ghana, entrepreneurship training by the WWW Foundation, 2011/2012.
• Reviewer HCI, UX and usability conferences and publications, ongoing.

Teaching Activities and Industry Collaborations

• An experienced and international group of project mentors for the HCI semester projects, semester 2 2012: Rod Farmer from Mobile Experiences (Australia), Lucia Terrenghi from Google (Switzerland), David Hutchful from Grameen Foundation (Ghana) and Charles Hansen-Quao from DreamOval (Ghana).
• Mozilla Student outreach collaboration during HCI course semester 2 2011
• Google user experience (UX) Africa team collaboration during HCI course semester 2 2011

Supervision (2011-2012)

• Diana Dayaka Osei (thesis)
  "Enabling Sign Language Instruction with Technology: the Case of Developing a Computerized Learning Tool for Ghanaian Sign Language (GhSL)"
• Ariel Taylor (Thesis)
  "Animation as a Tool for Development Communication: An HCI Perspective"
• Donald Adu-Poku (Thesis) 
  "Flow in Games: Aural Conditioning"
• Ivan Tetteh Digber (Applied Project) 
  “Catch The Bus:” Facilitating Transportation to and from the Ashesi campus in Berekuso

Supervision (2010-2011)

• Emmanuel Ofotsu Apronti (thesis)
  "Ensuring usability and security in mobile payment applications"
• Henry Nii Odartey Cleland (Thesis)
  "The role of interaction design in Ghanaian business process management initiatives"
• Ebenezer Gwumah Buckman (Thesis)
  "Social media and brand marketing: How Ghanaian companies can leverage social media platforms to boost brand awareness"
• Nana Owusu-Panin Owusu-Ankomah (Thesis)
  "Improving the usability of basic functionalities of low end mobile phones used by market women in Ghana"

Selected Publications

• GA Korsah and AT Larssen, Open Session on “Enabling ICTD From “Within”: Educating technologists for development in Africa”, a panel at the 5thInternational Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2012), March 2012.
• AT Larssen, "Dust, Multiple SIMs and Music Sharing" article in User Experience, UX 10.2 2011, a magazine published by the Usability Professionals Association
  
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "Understanding Movement in Technology Interactions ", Workshop "Embodied Interaction: Theory and Practice in HCI" at ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), Vancouver, BC, Canada.
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "Experiential Bodily Knowing as a Design (Sens)-ability in Interaction Design Desform", 3rd European Conference on Design & Semantics of Form & Movement (DeSForM 2007), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. [PDF]
• L Loke, AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "Understanding Movement for Interaction Design: Frameworks and Approaches", Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, vol. 11, no. 8, 2007, 691-702. [PDF]
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "The feel dimension of technology interaction: exploring tangibles through movement and touch", Tangible and embedded interaction (TEI) 2007, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, pp. 271 - 278. [PDF]
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "How it feels, not just how it looks: when bodies interact with technology", (OZCHI 2006), Sydney, Australia, pp. 329 - 332. [PDF]
• L Loke, AT Larssen and T Robertson, 'Labanotation for Design of Movement-Based Interaction', Conference on Interactive Entertainment (IE2005), Sydney, Australia, 2005. [PDF]
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "Mechanics and Meaning: Methodological Considerations when Studying Movement in HCI", Critical Computing (CC'05): Between Sense and Sensibility: The Fourth Decennial Aarhus Conference, Aarhus, Denmark, 2005. [PDF]
• AT Larssen, T Robertson, M Brereton, L Loke and J Edwards (eds), "Workshop: Approaches to Movement-Based Interaction", at Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility: The Fourth Decennial Aarhus Conference, Aarhus, Denmark [PDF - workshop proceedings].
• L Loke, AT Larssen and T Robertson, "Gesture and Eyetoy™: A Human-Centred Analysis of Movement-Based Interaction", Gesture Interaction Workshop, 2005, Sydney, Australia. [Presentation]
• AT Larssen, T Robertson and J Edwards, "Understanding Movement as Input for Interaction-A Study of Two Eyetoy™ Games", OZCHI 2004, Wollongong, Australia. [PDF]
• AT Larssen, "Physical Computing - Representations of Human Movement in Human-Computer Interaction", APCHI 2004, Rotorua, New Zealand.