The University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections holds several incredible collections of women filmmakers. To bring attention to these collections, I helped create the podcast series Beyond Scope and Content: Hidden Histories in the Film Archives. In addition, I uploaded videos from the collections to the Internet Archive, providing rich metadata for each video to ensure their discovery and descriptive closed captioning to allow for greater accessibility. As a result, anyone listening to Beyond Scope and Content can check out videos referenced in the podcasts and watch the amazing work of these women.

This capstone focuses on developing an Arizona offline digital library for tribal communities that will aid in building towards a pilot project in areas with limited access to a reliable internet connection, especially where infrastructure support for reliable internet service may be a long-term goal. A beta digital library has been created, and resources focused on language, and cultural preservation for the Hualapai tribe continue to be curated for the collection. The project will provide an opportunity for communities to access various resources created by and relevant to their community without needing access to the internet or electricity.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is a biomedical research institution. Arnold Library is the main information hub for the research workforce. Medicine and biomedical research have a dark history of neglecting the needs of certain people, even mistreating or subjecting them to unethical practices to benefit the powerful. White, heterosexual, cis-males were long the primary concern, becoming the “normative” model. Arnold Library rejects that legacy by working to integrate DEI. The library is improving its collections and services, and I collaborated by auditing the book collection for DEI materials and writing a new DEI section in the collection management policy.

Arrived Homes is a real estate investment start-up that allows anyone with $100 to invest in property. Arrived Homes had a manual sorting process for their acquisition process where their buyers sifted through thousands of MLS listings to find eligible properties, costing them time and missed opportunities. We developed a tool to automate Arrived's acquisition process with an intuitive interface displaying data aggregated from sources such as Zillow, Redfin, and Century 21, along with an algorithm to suggest properties with the highest expected return. This allows Arrived to increase the acquisition process and scalability to enter new markets moving forward.

Inclusive design is a methodology of making design choices that increases usability for the full range of diversity. Many intro-level designers are not aware of the definition, practice of, and need for inclusive design. The resulting products have bad user experiences for impaired users. To address this problem, we have designed an interactive game with challenges that reflect difficulties impaired users face when dealing with products. Through Awaken, we aim to raise the awareness of inclusive design, build empathy and understanding toward impairments through real-world stories, and ultimately influence more designers to make products that are usable for everyone.

Social media companies are notoriously known for storing immense amounts of users’ personal data. While many social media sites do provide an option to view and download your data, the data is often given in raw formats, which can be overwhelming or hard to understand for the average user. Our project aims to analyze users’ downloaded data, and output it as data visualizations that are much more informative and intuitive. We hope that Aware will help people become more aware about what data is being stored about them and become incentivized to be more cautious about their online behavior.

Behance is an Adobe product where designers share their creative work. Behance’s help desk is set up on Zendesk, due to which the user interface of the FAQ page lacked homogeneity with the Behance website. The current page lacked intuitiveness, making it difficult for customers to find answers, leading to a bad user experience. In this project, we redesigned the FAQ module by rearranging information into concise categories using Behance’s theme, providing guided navigation, and kickstart with featured articles. This project will ensure customer satisfaction with a better User experience at this self-service portal and is expected to reduce customer support tickets.

Seasonal Affective Disorder affects more than 15 million people in the U.S., with women four times more likely to be diagnosed than men. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic makes more people live with limited social interaction and reduced sun exposure, which are leading factors that could cause/exacerbate SAD. Better Weather is a web app which helps SAD sufferers combat their symptoms with proven interventions. Through its different feature pages, users have the chance to foster connectedness & peer support, relieve stress, increase exposure to sunlight, and ultimately improve their mood.

Current discussions about ethical use of artificial intelligence for cultural heritage focus on bias, privacy, and surveillance. This paper illustrates how ethics of heritage AI should expand beyond those themes into broader human and environmental exploitation AI causes that put it at odds with efforts toward decolonization. This paper suggests a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that examines the broader effects of AI used for heritage work and focuses on AI that is used for collections and exhibits. It focuses on AI use by heritage organizations such as libraries, museums, and archives, in addition to non-heritage groups participating in heritage work.

Diverse BookFinder critically reframes diversity in picture books through identifying trends in BIPOC representation and providing resources for creating intentional collections that decenter whiteness as the dominant narrative. This capstone initiates developing asynchronous teaching and learning resources that complement existing tools. Through a sorting activity that connects dominant messaging trends and race/culture narratives, librarians, educators, and caregivers will grow their awareness of the impact of BIPOC representation and develop skills to expand their own collections. This project highlights the necessity of active engagement and reflection around which books we read, whose stories we value, and how experiences inform narratives.