massaro-interview

Dr. Dominic Massaro

Interview Excerpts (excerpt excerpt: 6:30)

For this project I chose to interview Dr. Dominic Massaro, a professor of Psychology and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Massaro's work focuses on issues relating to the psychology of education and technology, considering how software can help better teach, inform, and equip people to succeed. Though Massaro's career has focused mostly on approaching this problem from the technical/scientific side, I find strong connections between his goals and my own attempts to bring interactive stories to a broader audience from the artistic side of things.

One educational initiative that Dr. Massaro was recently involved with was the Kid Klok, an attempt to help elementary students learn to read time on analog clocks. The Kid Klok is something like a clock with training wheels: it is designed specifically to minimize the confusing elements of reading analog time. The big hand and little hand are colored differently and clearly distinct, to reduce confusion between the two; the regular circle of numbers from 1-12 is color-coded and positioned to coincide with the little (hour) hand, while a second circle of numbers from 0-59 is added that corresponds with the minute hand. Professor Massaro's design of the Kid Klok also included an aggressive awareness campaign, including two books, teaching materials, and bringing it to market as a saleable product, something he has spearheaded with many of his products (most recently through a company he started called the Animated Speech Corporation).

Like Dr. Massaro, I struggle with finding ways to teach novices how to interact with the systems that make up my area of artistic discourse (interactive fiction). Through research of test cases, careful thought, and the design and release of extensions to make new players more comfortable and at-home with IF, I've wrested with many of the same issues as Professor Massaro. We both share a two-pronged approach to solving these sorts of problems: a desire to both find better ways to teach confusing material, and to adjust the material itself to make it more welcoming, while still retaining its original complexity.

Dr. Massaro's successful launches of products such as the Animated Speech Corporation titles featuring Baldi, an animated character who speaks dialogue and helps deaf and hard of hearing children, demonstrate a successful balancing act between originating ideas in an academic context and turning them into actual products that can be used in the real world. I've struggled with this before as well: I showed my project Whom the Telling Changed both at an indie gaming festival, where primary concerns were with games as entertainment and most of the showcasing artists were hoping to score deals with big label game companies, and also at an electronic literature festival, which focused on the entries as art and commercial viability was the last thing on most attendees agendas. Like Massaro, I firmly believe that academic ideas, in art as well as science, must break out of the institutional boundaries and reach the eyes and minds of larger communities. My interactive novel Blue Lacuna has only been cited in one academic paper, but it has been played by several thousand people, and the latter statistic is by far the more important to me.

Professor Massaro continues working with the Perpetual Science Lab on new groundbreaking projects, including Speech Specs?, a product that projects phoneme information analyzed real-time from surrounding conversation on custom glasses, providing supplemental visual cues to assist deaf or hard-of-hearing wearers. It was a pleasure chatting with him and I hope to work with him in the future.