Will Odom

Teaching & research interests

• Slow interaction and temporal design
• Digital possessions
• Internet of things
• Domestic computing
• Digital fabrication
• Research through design
• Speculative design
• User experience design

Dr. William Odom is Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, where he is co-director of the Everyday Design Studio. His research group takes an interdisciplinary, collaborative, creative, and design-oriented approach to Human-Computer Interaction research. We like to design, build, and make things. He recently received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to build a next generation design research studio with dedicated support for digital fabrication, electronics prototyping, finishing, assembly, and documentation for batch producing research products and prototypes. 

His work has appeared at venues including the ACM CHI, DIS, Ubicomp, Creativity & Cognition, CSCW conferences, and the journal Design Issues. He is the co-recipient of six best paper awards (CHI 2011, Ubicomp 2011, DIS 2012, CHI 2014, DIS 2018, DIS 2018) and six best paper honorable mention awards (CHI 2010, CHI 2013, CHI 2016, DIS 2016, DIS 2016, CHI 2018). His work on the Technology Heirlooms project in collaboration with Microsoft Research received a silver international design excellence award (IDEA) for design research from the Industrial Designers Society of America. He won the Imagine Cup Design competition in Interaction Design held at the Louvre in Paris, France. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia, a Design United Research Fellow in the Netherlands, and a Banting Fellow in Canada.

The Everyday Design Studio is a design research studio in Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Our group specializes in the areas of research through design, interaction design, and tangible computing. Our research investigates the changing nature of interaction design in response to the increasing role technology plays in mediating everyday practices like reminiscence, self exploration, social connection, the making of home life, and so on. In the spirit of design research, we aim to be reflective and generative. We design new computational things and systems, and study them in the context of people’s everyday lives. We often also develop new methods for better supporting the practice of design research.

We have also recently been awarded a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to build a new dedicated lab for making ‘research products’ that combines equipment for digital fabrication, electronics prototyping and small batch production, finishing, and product/demo/field documentation. Our studio will receive an additional extension of 1100 square feet of space to house this equipment and the our design research, practice and creative culture. It is an exciting time to join our studio!

Our  studio prides itself on a strong collaborative culture with a friendly, engaging, and highly creative atmosphere. New graduate students will work on projects that include digital fabrication with hybrid materials, designing ’the things’ of the internet of things, slow interaction design, approach to working with data as a design material. Please contact Dr. William Odom at wodom@sfu.ca to express you interest in a position as a Masters or PhD student.

• William Odom and Tijs Duel. 2018. On the Design of OLO Radio: Investigating Metadata as a Design Material. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 104, 9 pages. 
• William Odom, Daisuke Uriu, David Kirk, Richard Banks, and Ron Wakkary. "Experiences in Designing Technologies for Honoring Deceased Loved Ones." Design Issues 34, no. 1 (2018): 54-66.
• Doenja Oogjes, William Odom, and Pete Fung. 2018. Designing for an other Home: Expanding and Speculating on Different Forms of Domestic Life. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 313-326. 
• William Odom, Ron Wakkary, Youn-kyung Lim, Audrey Desjardins, Bart Hengeveld, and Richard Banks. 2016. From Research Prototype to Research Product. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2549-2561. 
• William Odom, Ron Wakkary, Ishac Bertran, Matthew Harkness, Garnet Hertz, Jeroen Hol, Henry Lin, Bram Naus, Perry Tan, and Pepijn Verburg. 2018. Attending to Slowness and Temporality with Olly and Slow Game: A Design Inquiry Into Supporting Longer-Term Relations with Everyday Computational Objects. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 77, 13 pages.
  

• PH.D. in Human-Computer Interaction,
  School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2014)
• Fulbright Scholar
  Design Department, Queensland College of Art
  Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia (2009)
• M.S. Human-Computer Interaction Design
  School of Informatics, Indiana University (2008)
• B.S. Informatics w/ distinction
  Minor: Information Technology, Music
  School of Informatics, Indiana University (2006)
• B.A. Folklore / Ethnomusicology
  College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University (2006)