Hello there! My name is Rishi. I’m currently a fifth-year PhD student in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am advised by Ellen Do, and work at the ACME Lab. Before joining ATLAS, I completed an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering, and a graduate degree in Interaction Design (where I was a member of the IMXD Lab), both from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Research

For a more details, here’s a list of publications, and a link to my CV.

Through my dissertation work, I aim to support people as they make meaning and memories while collaborating across distance, time, and devices. Space and spatial interaction are crucial aspects of how meaning and memories are made in everyday life. I explore how we can maximize the potential of everyday devices like mobile phones and tablets for spatial computing, and study how this changes the way people work together in hybrid environments.

In the DualStream project (also here), we showcase how mobile phones can be used to support rich and practical forms of spatial remote communication in a range of contexts. More recently, we have studied the dynamics of mobile spatial collaboration relative to video calls (paper), and are drawing from ideas of seamful interaction and trajectories to design ecosystems for everyday spatial computing (in progress).

For a higher-level phrasing of my research goals:

As a designer and human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher, I build and study new interactive systems that support meaningful forms of collaboration across space and time. With new technologies seeking to radically change the way we live and work, often for the worse, I believe we have a responsibility to take a more critical and intentional stance towards design, and “commit to a possible, by means of resisting the probable” (Stengers, 2017). Building upon insights from the allied fields of Science & Technology Studies, Social and Cognitive Sciences, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Philosophy, I design tools for collaboration in the immediate future, and demonstrate possible alternatives to the dominant implementations of systems that use Spatial Computing and AI.

During my PhD, I’ve also been fortunate to work with:

  • The Intentional Meetings team at Microsoft Research Cambridge, on designing interfaces to support temporal work across meetings with Generative AI (Summer 2024).
  • Ericsson Research (CA, USA), on developing systems for spatial remote communication that adapt to changing network conditions (Summer 2023).

Design

Some other things I’ve worked on over the years:

Beyond

Music

I’ve been sporadically writing songs and composing music for a few years now. Some of my older songs can be found on my Soundcloud page.

In another life, I was part of a semi-professional blues rock band, with five friends of mine. We were called Bluemoss.