Interactions

Welcome to my design+health blog. Let me first briefly introduce myself and tell you what you can expect to see from my blog.

I am currently a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington Medicine. My research area largely lies in social media for health. More specifically, I have been studying online health communities and video blogs for how individuals with chronic illness exchange peer help and how moderators' roles shape peer help. This fall, I will be joining the Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University as an assistant professor and will have adjunct positions in the College of Engineering and the College of Nursing. I will be taking part in their Trifecta initiative, which is to link various expertise from the Colleges of Engineering, Communication Arts and Sciences, and Nursing to facilitate interdisciplinary research in communication technology and health. 

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan School of Information and a master’s from the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I was originally trained as an artist from middle school until college back in Korea. The story of how I moved from fine arts to HCI to information science to health will take up another blog post. 

By reading my blog, you can expect to explore overlapping areas between design and health. Examples include:

• review of recent research and products around health and implications from an HCI designer's perspective
• perspectives around medicine, design, and HCI community
• opinions from guest writers.

This blog will be a place for me to play around with thoughts that I cannot necessarily explore in an empirical research publication. For instance, I found out about the Music Genome Project this morning while I was listening to Pandora radio. I think this is a fascinating idea and I could not help myself mentally writing about how the project compares to the Genome Project, the GenBank, the protein bank, and the ontology problems in bioinformatics. I also had a random thought a few months ago on searching PubMed using the keyword designers to see how designers are viewed by the medical community. I will devote each blog entry to such thought explorations that connect design and health in peculiar ways beyond the canonical relationship between design and health.

I always welcome commenters with reactions or advice—or if you would like to contact me privately for any reason please email me jina.huh [at] gmail.com.

Thank you,

Jina

Jina Huh is NLM Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington Medicine Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics. Starting in fall 2013 she will be an assistant professor at Michigan State University's College of Communication Arts and Sciences.

Jina Huh