Joyce Ma
Joyce studies how people interact with ideas, objects and each other.
She is currently at the Exploratorium, a museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco, where she characterizes visitors' experiences to inform exhibit development and to understand the nature of informal learning. She also develops new experiences for visitors and new methods and tools for research.
Before joining the Exploratorium, she conducted research on mental models, analogical reasoning, and computer-based learning environments that scaffold students in building and testing models. In her previous career, she worked at a telecommunications research laboratory on new broadband architectures.
Selected Work
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A Snapshot of the People Outside An observation study at the proposed site for the Outdoor Exploratorium project, looking at who currently are in the space, where they are, and what they are doing. Animations help visualize the data of who are where and when.
The Outdoor Exploratorium Project |
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Walk-along: What visitors notice on their way to the Exploratorium A walk-along, talk-aloud study to identify what visitors notice as they walk between their cars and the Exploratorium. Findings informed the content foci for outdoor exhibits and identified promising and challenging physical spaces for the exhibits.
Front-End Evaluation The Outdoor Exploratorium Project |
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Visitor Conversations around an Interactive Microscope Exhibit A look and a listen to what visitors are looking at and talking about at our interactive microscope at the Exploratorium. This study used videos of the visitors at the microscope exhibit synchronized with the video captured from the microscope itself. Results informed content development for accompanying media at the exhibit.
Formative Evaluation Microscope Imaging Station Project at the Exploratorium |
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What's Underground - A Citywide Outdoor Activity A formative evaluation for the first instantiation of a class of Exploratorium activities that encourages people to look (again) at aspects of their outdoor environment in the course of their daily routine. An accompanying website supports users’ explorations. Findings changed the proposed structure of the activity.
Formative Evaluation The Outdoor Exploratorium Project |
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Tracking and Timing Tool Suite A set of tools to facilitate the data capture, entry and analysis for timing and tracking studies, which are typically done with paper and pencil in the museum field. These tools have been used by myself and other researchers to understand traffic patterns, holding times, and exhibit attraction power for the Exploratorium's Mind Exhibit Collection and the Secrets of Circles Exhibition at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose.
Development of Methods and Tools for Research and Evaluation |
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An interactive media exhibit based on a research study done by Condry and Condry (1976) on gender stereotyping. Users view a 'boy' or a 'girl' baby reacting to a Jack-in-the-Box and rate the child's response. The interactive tallies the ratings for the 'boy' and the 'girl', runs statistical tests, and draws graphs to show the difference, if any, between people who thought they were watching a boy versus those who thought they were watching a girl. This was prototyped in Director and then converted to Flash for the Exploratorium's Mind Website. .
Exhibit Development The Mind Project at the Exploratorium |
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Trading Places A card game based on the Implicit Association Test from Harvard University, which asks subjects to place words (e.g. babies, Kevin, business, Nancy) into two categories (e.g., male or family versus female or career). The Exploratorium exhibit began as a media interactive adapted for use on a kiosk, which was ill-suited for the social, hands-on environment of the Exploratorium. However, as a card game where pairs of visitors race each other to place their cards into the right categories, we motivated visitors to sort as quickly as possible, gave pairs of visitors to opportunity to talk about their shared experience (and stereotypes) with each other, and provided visitors the chance to physically experience their hesitation for difficult words to sort.
Exhibit Development The Mind Project at the Exploratorium |
became...
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User Experience Researcher Developer Designer Informal Science Education Researcher
