Welcome to the personal website of Kaz Grace, researcher and lecturer/tutor at the University of Sydney. I teach interaction design (and some other things) at the Design Lab in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, and conduct HCI research at the CHAI group at the School of IT. My doctoral thesis, submitted in 2011, was on the role of associative reasoning in design thinking. This page contains a list of academic publications relating to my doctoral and other research, as well as some research directions I am pursuing.

If you're one of my students looking for teaching materials, they are all hosted on the University of Sydney's eLearning system.

I can be contacted at:

Doctoral Thesis

• Interpretation-driven association in design, submitted August 2011 under the supervision of Dr Rob Saunders and Professor John Gero.

Publications

• Grace, K, Gero, J and Saunders, R: (2012) Representational affordances and creativity in association-based systems, in , ML Maher, K Hammond, A Pease, R Perez y Perez, D Ventura and G Wiggins (eds), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Creativity, University College Dublin, Ireland, pp. 195--202. (pdf)
• Grace, K, Gero, J and Saunders, R: (2012) Constructing computational associations between ornamental designs, in, T Fischer, K De Biswas, J Ham, R Naka and W Huang (eds), Beyond Codes and Pixels CAADRIA2012, CAADRIA, Hong Kong, pp. 37--46. (pdf)
• Hespanhol, L, Tomitsch, M, Grace, K, Collins, A and Kay, J: (2012) Investigating intuitiveness and effectiveness of gestures for free spatial interaction with large displays in E Huang (ed), 2012 International Symposium on Pervasive Displays.
• Grace, K, Saunders, R and Gero, J: (2011) Interpretation-driven visual association, in D Ventura, P Gervas, DF Harrell, ML Maher, A Pease and G Wiggins (eds), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Creativity, Mexico City, pp. 132--134. (pdf)
• Grace, K, Gero, J and Saunders, R: (2011) Applying interpretation-driven association to design domains, in CM Herr, N Gu, S Roudavski and MA Schnabel (eds), Circuit Bending, Breaking and Mending, CAADRIA, Hong Kong, pp. 453--462. (pdf)
• Grace, K, Saunders, R and Gero, J: (2010) Constructing conceptual spaces for novel associations, in D Ventura, A Pease, R Perez y Perez, G Ritchie and T Veale (eds), Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity, University of Coimbra, pp.110--119. (pdf)
• Saunders, R and Grace, K: (2009) Extending Context Free to teach interactive evolutionary design systems, EvoMUSART 2009, Eberhard Karls Universitat, Tubingen, Germany. (also published as a chapter in Applications of Evolutionary Computing, Vol. 5484 of LNCS, Springer, pp. 591--596.) (pdf)
• Gero, J, Grace, K and Saunders, R: (2008) Computational analogy-making in design: A process architecture, in W Nakapan, E Mahaek, K Teeraparbwong and P Nilkaew (eds), CAADRIA 2008, Pimniyom Press, Thailand, pp. 309-316. (pdf)
• Saunders, R and Grace, K: (2008) Towards a computational model of creative cultures, AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent Systems, AAAI Press. (pdf)
• Grace, K, Saunders, R and Gero, J: (2008) A computational model for constructing novel associations, International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. (pdf)
• Grace, K, Gero, J and Saunders, R: (2006) Assisting design by analogy, in S Shannon, V Soebarto and T Williamson (eds), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Architectural Science Association, University of Adelaide, Australia.

Research Directions

• Interactive public-space displays: This project, in progress at the CHAI research group at the School of IT of Sydney University, is investigating interaction design principles for interactive wall displays in public spaces. The goal of the project is to develop an understanding of how information spaces can be intuitively navigated with Natural User Interfaces, and how informative public-space displays can spark and sustain engagement. A design-based research approach is being undertaken, with a large rear-projected interactive installation to be installed on the prow of the SIT Building. This work is being conducted under the supervision of Professor Judy Kay, in conjunction with Dr Martin Tomitsch and is funded by the SmartServices CRC.
• Metaphor in creative societies: This project, for which a proposal is currently being developed, will investigate how metaphorical language is used in creative societies with rapidly expanding negotiated lexicons. Creative individuals working in the same domain use associations to familiar concepts, objects and ideas to connect their emerging body of work to the shared understanding of the society. This project will use multi-agent simulations of communicating creators to investigate the way this association-based language affects the development of creative cultures. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with Dr Rob Saunders.
• An association-based model of design style: This project, for which a proposal is currently being developed, will investigate how designed objects can be stylistically categorised based on how they are associated. The model of association developed in my doctoral thesis produces not only a mapping between two objects but the interpretation under which they can be mapped. This interpretation can be considered a description of how the abstract similarity between the two objects can be realised. The goal of this project is to construct a model of design style in which the characteristics of the interpretations that relate objects can be used to differentiate design styles. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with Professor John Gero.