Sid Lamaute

Summary: I pitched a feature to the C-suite at Embr Labs to address loneliness with a shared remote thermal touch intervention in May 2020 (early in the pandemic). This was based on an idea from a university collaborator, Hans Rocha IJzerman at the University of Grenoble, and my additional research on the "Loneliness Epidemic", declared by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in 2018.

I researched the market and learned how to use lean canvases to make a business case when I noticed that Embr could leverage this unique opportunity to use thermal haptics to replicate touch between users. Once the C-suite approved, I was assigned my first major project management opportunity, and was mentored by the Chief Data Officer. I worked with a team of 5 doing everything from designing the thermal sensation to developing the app's UI. I personally became involved with the UX development process, in partnership with the company's UX designer.

As a result, I worked on a range of tasks, including user flow design, user acceptance testing, intellectual property research, and human subject study design. I researched IP so that the marketing team could get a trademark on my proposed feature name--Embrace--and so that the research team could evaluate the feasibility of a patent application. Meanwhile, I kept in mind that this was not just a feature; it was conceived as an intervention for feelings of isolation. In partnership with Professor IJzerman and the internal Senior Research Scientist, we created two 5-minute surveys for feature users based on psychological measures for connection. The objective was to measure the effectiveness of the intervention in making people feel more connected.

After just 5 months, collaborating remotely in unprecedented times, we launched the feature. We sent initial and 8-week surveys to people who used the feature, and found that 90% of users liked the feature, and the majority of those who filled out the pre-use and 8-week surveys felt an increased sense of connection with the primary person with whom they exchanged warmth.

What I Learned: Business case development, project management, intellectual property research, user acceptance testing, collaborative UI design, human subject study design

Summary: When I joined Embr Labs, I had ample latitude to pick my research topics, and I was and still am interested in technological interventions for mental maladies. I read numerous papers on temperature and depression, narrowed to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which then led to studying and prototyping a thermal alarm and scheduling thermal sessions to bring regular relief for when people know they need it most. This initially involved modifying the firmware (in C) on the wearable device to design a gradual awakening session. I then ran internal alpha tests for both technical and user experience reasons: 1. I had to check if the wearable experienced any time drift when programmed to start 8 hours after the session was set

Summary: Translating a mural into a dynamic, 3D representation was an amazing challenge to give myself. In coming back to the earliest craft I learned--sewing--I decided to push myself to come up with techniques I'd never tried before.

My community from MIT has a classic motto: "Sport Death: Only Life Can Kill You". The meaning amounts to something along the lines of "live life to the fullest" and/or "carpe diem" (even though as someone who studied Latin for a decade, it's important to note that the context of "carpe diem" in Horace's poem has a narrower focus and more lascivious intent than that which many people think in the modern day.) Here's what the default iconography looks like--"ONLY LIFE CAN KILL YOU" is spelled out in the teeth of the skull.

My friend made the mural in the heading picture, a variation of the default skull, in 2009. The brain actually consists of letters that spell out "SPORT DEATH 2HNC" (in which 2HNC is where she lived in the community's dorm). She told me it came to her in a dream, in which the colors of the letters were continually shifting and changing.

The way the folding of the skull could be captured by ruching fabric was what drew me toward making this a sewing project. My challenge was then to find fabrics that exhibited the closest to iridescence that I could find, so that when the light caught it at different angles, the colors would exhibit the same shifting and changing quality as she envisioned.

Between December 2023 and March 2024 I bought fabrics from 5 different shops in NYC, yielding 12 total to work with for the letters alone. (In this process, I once had to pull out my rusty French to try to communicate the idea of "iridescence" to a francophone shop assistant.)

I already had a physical print-out of the skull in my possession, so I traced its outline and experimented with what I wanted the skull to say--I never lived on 2HNC and wanted to make this a more broadly applicable piece. Here were some sketches:

(I replaced 2HNC here with "[heart] ROAST" in the first picture because I was preparing this for our annual reunion, called Steer Roast. Also, sorry for the quality of the second image.)

By the end of drafting, I decided to go with "SPORT DEATH 4EVER", then did some math to scale up the skull, and drew it on a clear sheet of plastic so that I could trace patterns later.

My initial planned technique for the letters was to have every part of each letter raised to look most like the folds of a brain and really feature the iridescent qualities of each fabric, like in this prototype "S":

However, because I was working with a lot of different fabrics, many less tightly woven and/or stiff, it was hard to sew many of them in a bent position. Also, since the "stripes" were achieved with often heterogeneous types of fabrics, the differing stiffnesses made it hard to constrain the letters to their intended shapes. And all of that is putting aside all the measurement required to achieve the fluid curves of each letter using this 3D technique. Due to my time constraints (I wanted to present this at the reunion from May 3-5, but started sewing on weekends in March, and had to hand sew every letter to use different thread colors for each), I decided to revisit my plan. Creating loops of one fabric atop another flat fabric still produced the intended effect while making construction much easier.

The letters came out pretty satisfyingly, and one can see the shift in color a bit from these 2 slightly different angles. (The following pictures were taken before doing the final trimming of loose strands.)

After the letters, the other 3D details were:

The stars, which I folded and hand-sewed to make them slightly raised rather than completely flush with the surface. Even though they were going to be scrunched up, I wanted them to pop.

The ooze. I wanted to make sure it actually hung over the eye rather than being sewn directly on top, and sewed on a backside to make it round, like how actual dripping paint would appear.

Ruching, which was a new technique for me, and it took some experimentation, but I was pretty satisfied with the high-level effect produced in the end.

Finally, to assemble everything on the 2XL shirt I bought so that I could show off this work all day at the reunion, I decided to sew down velcro and velcro the skull components and teeth onto the shirt rather than sew it all down directly so that:

I could adjust placement of all the parts on the fly

I would be able to machine wash the shirt, as many of the fabrics in the letters would likely disintegrate in the machine.

Summary: I took Interactive Data Visualization as part of a concentration in Human-Computer Interfaces. For the final project in the class, my team chose visualizing territorial exchanges around the world between 1815 and 2018. We combined multiple data display methods and interactive elements into one visualization, which allowed us to display the details of a rich dataset coherently and accessibly.

Summary: I took Interactive Data Visualization as part of a concentration in Human-Computer Interfaces. For this assignment in the class, we had to tell a story with a data visualization. Mental health awareness and interventions are a major passion of mine, so I found a team who was also interested in visualizing how depression affects all sorts of individuals in their daily lives. The goal was to use this to spread awareness around mental health, particularly to de-stigmatize and build empathy. 

I did the majority of the coding for this project, which was written in d3.js--a new language to me. This involved connecting the CSV of data we found from a national survey on depression to the filters in the front-end and then randomly selecting 4 visual stories that fit the filtering criteria (which became the radar plots) to display. The second and third images depict what was displayed if there were not enough people who met the filtering criteria.

Summary: I was honored as an Open Style Lab at Parsons School of Design Fellow for 2018.  In this program, we were tasked with designing a wearable garment for an aging person with a disability. My team’s client is a wheelchair user in a rehabilitation facility who is dressed in bed, and thus we had to accommodate for those factors in creating two garments--a jacket and skirt. With her limited range of mobility, difficulty communicating, and need for assistance in mind, we made the ensemble focusing on speed, simplicity, comfort, and easy care. The jacket was designed so that she was able to put it on herself by allowing her to put it on and take it off from the front, as she could not reach behind her.  In fact, I specifically designed the two subtle holes in the seams of the collar for her to use by putting her finger in each one to pull the jacket over her head. The skirt was designed to make it easier for caregivers to dress her in bed by being able to slide it under her rather than having to make her lift herself up, which is fatiguing for her.  Both of these garments were designed for maximizing comfort in her wheelchair--the short back on the jacket prevented excess fabric in the back gathering between her and the chair, which used to happen with her traditional jacket. The skirt was designed with pants as the back to prevent any slippage of her undergarments or any wrinkling beneath her, as the latter could cause sores. Meanwhile, we had to account for her personal desires--cleanliness, in addition to a love of art, bright colors, and elephants (with the trunk up for good luck).  For the body of the jacket, we used a bright blue (unfortunately misrepresented in the picture) stain- and wear-resistant fabric with a stretchier, light, moisture-wicking wool for the back of the jacket.  The skirt had a custom pattern on “flowy” sport lycra inspired by her relationship with her devoted husband, with comfortably conforming and odor-preventing wool for the rear of the skirt. The wool was specifically placed where she makes contact with the chair, addressing the areas where moisture and odor often accumulate. There’s also an article on the work we did this summer.

Summary: In Design: Information and Visualization, we had to collect data for a week. I picked a personal project and monitored how often "I" and "You" came up in conversations with my closest friends. My broader question was whether the conversation more often revolved around me or was more balanced.  Even though a visual was not required, I ended up sketching a binary star representation, influenced by my Type 1a Supernovae project, to show who took up more of the mass of each conversation.

Summary: For the class Digital Design Lab, which meshed with my unofficial Signals, Systems, and Controls concentration, my partner and I decided to make a PID-controlled* height adjustable hover table using an FPGA**. While my partner worked on the code for the FPGA, I worked on actually building the hover table, which involved winding electromagnets by hand and designing the components such that the physics worked out.  The main challenge in this part was determining how big of electromagnets I could make with the current source we had, and from there, the maximum weight of the tabletop to be able to control its height with an object of approximately 5 grams on it. What I Learned: How to make electromagnets, laser cutting, and how to persist in the face of physics, including iterative design for the tabletop.

Documentation: presentation, final report

Summary: For the class Design: Objects and Interaction, we were assigned to make a wearable. Since I am interested in wearable devices for mental health, I wanted to make a mask that shows how people lie about their emotions as part of daily life.  While initially my inclination was to make something high tech, as I always have when working in wearables, I was encouraged to take it in a different direction. I explored other ways to change expression, and ended up with the Empathy Replicator™, a product designed to help customer service workers spare their facial muscles from consistent effort.  Instead of having to produce a genuine smile with crinkling eyes, or having to feign concern, one can switch in various emotions with this glasses-like structure. What I Learned: Genuine emotions are largely expressed in the eyes, as well as laser cutting and manipulating the resulting acrylic by conforming it to the curve of a face with a heat gun.

Summary: For the class Design: Objects and Interaction, we had to create a 3D-printed textile.  As we looked over the history of textiles, I was struggling to come up with anything that could be novel, and especially found chainmail boring and overdone.  After more thought, however, I remembered some of what I learned in a Knot Theory class I took in high school, especially a special link called the Borromean Rings.  They are assembled in a set of three, as shown below: