Sasha Harris-Cronin

Sasha Harris-Cronin is the lead creative programmer at BBI Engineering in San Francisco. For 14 years, she has worked with museums and exhibit designers across the country to create exhibits and experiences primarily in the realm of physical computing and new technologies.  She works as everything from programmer to designer to project manager to media producer and technology designer.  Sasha also teaches Interaction Design in the MFA program at the California College of Art.

What are you working on?

For the last year, I have been collaborating with the Lighthouse for the Blind of SF creating a tactile interface that is accessible to all ranges of sight for use in the conference rooms of their new offices.  Their offices open at the end of the month, so we are in the home stretch!  I did the IxD and UX and backend programming and my company did all the fabrication and custom electronics.  I have just finished project managing the programming effort for the interactive exhibits at The National Blues Museum and in the last year project managed the creation of an interactive wall for the Executive Briefing Center of HP Enterprise.  I also teach Year 0 Interaction Design fall semester at California College of the Arts.

What are you excited by? What do you want to brag to us about?  What did you try, and in the spirit of Red, fail at utterly and completely?

I’m excited by the opportunities of IoT to solve problems in the commercial and industrial space.  There are so many interesting problems, workflows, and data in that realm.

The tactile interface that we’ve created is really super cool.  It was very exciting to do a really user-centered and iterative design process with an appropriate amount of time and especially for such a great client.

We constantly work on the edge of available technologies and I always live in fear that we are about to utterly fail.  I danced the edge of that with our extensive use of 4k video this year, and am still not satisfied with the outcome.

How do you find your degree relates to what you're working on now?

Absolutely and 100%.  In my role, I am always pushed to be creative with technology.  I work with hardware, software, and IxD on a daily basis.  Folks hire my company not because they know we have an off the shelf solution, but because they know we can invent one.  That is something I learned at ITP.