Resume

Austin Toombs Resume (.pdf)

Experience Designer

Education

M.S. Human-Computer Interaction Design

Indiana University | Bloomington, IN | May 2012

B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics

Ball State University | Muncie, IN | May 2010

Recent Design Projects

Significant Screwdriver

Arduino-modified screwdriver used to study gender divisions of care labor in the home. CHI workshop paper. Spring semester 2011.
Arduino, Data Visualization, Processing

Foodmunity

An online tool used to help neighbors appreciate the differences of other members of their community over a shared meal. Developed for the CHI 2011 student design challenge. (CHI2011 student design competition finalist)
Affinity Diagramming, Contextual Inquiry, Paper Prototyping, Powerpoint Prototyping

Relevant Work Experience

Teaching Assistantships and Mentoring

Indiana University Interaction Design Practice mentor | August to December 2011
Indiana University Foundations of HCI graduate course | August to December 2011
Indiana University Undergraduate Informatics Capstone course | August 2010 to May 2011
Ball State University HCI/GUI course | January to May 2010

Intern of Applied Research

LexisNexis | May 2011 to July 2011
Worked in the LexisNexis iLabs department creating and documenting concepts.
Balsamiq, Flex, Information Visualization, Mindmapping, Storyboarding, Survey Design

Undergraduate Research Assistant – CurricVis

Ball State University | May to September 2009
Designed and co-developed CurricVis, a visualization system that helps students with curricular decisions. Presented at the Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges: Midwest Region 2009 conference and in the ACM student research competition at SIGCSE 2010.
Usability Testing, Paper Prototyping, Java, YAML, Design Patterns, Test Driven Development

Software Developer – VSAT

Institute for Digital Entertainment and Education | May to September 2009
Designed and developed the ViziSwap Authoring Tool (VSAT), a commercial software application that operates as the project creation interface for ViziSwap. My advisor, Dr. Paul Gestwicki, and I used this as an opportunity to study the effectiveness of Usage-Centered Design on the design, development, and final quality of the product. Presented findings at CCSC:MW 2008, the BSU Student Symposium 2008, and the Butler University URC 2008.
Usage-Centered Design, Agile Development

Publications

Gestwicki, P. V., Haddad, A., Toombs, A., & Sun, F. (2009). An experience report and analysis of Java technologies in undergraduate game programming courses. The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 25(1), 102-108.
Click here for ACM Digital Library page for this article

Shad Gross, Austin Toombs, Jeff Wain, and Kevin Walorski. 2011. Foodmunity: designing community interactions over food. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI EA ‘11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1019-1024.
Click here for ACM Digital Library page for this article