One of my final assignments in HCC1 for this semester is a research ‘elevator pitch’. I wanted to share it with y’all. For this assignment, we were asked to write an elevator pitch for someone who loosely understands the field but knows nothing about you or your research.
Elevator pitches usually refer to a business pitch you’d give a very busy investor who you meet in an elevator, Starbucks line, or in any other time-constrained situation.
It’s funny - I fully thought my research goals had changed significantly from my first post back in September, but they have not. I said something along the lines of…
Right now, I’m interested conducting research studies on how the design of features on collaborative platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams dismantle and/or reinforce power structures in institutions like universities, nonprofits, workplaces, and hospitals.
You’ll see below that this very much is still my goal, but I now have (a) found an entire community of researchers who are interested in the same question, which means I get to save a lot of time and build upon their work and (b) been able to appreciate just how beautifully and frustratingly complex this topic actually is.
I'm Kayla Uleah Evans, a PhD at Georgia Tech in the Culture and Technology lab, advised by Dr. Betsy DiSalvo. I'm from Atlanta, but left to spend 5 years at Harvard College and the London School of Economics where I studied cognitive neuroscience, sociolinguistics, and political philosophy.
Baby Kayla in her junior year at Harvard. I was on the board of the Harvard Society for Mind, Brain, and Behavior & this was a panel our team organized! (Peep third from right then non-res Adams tutor, later mentor, and now author of 2023 National Bestseller: UnMasking AI… Joy Buolamwini!)
Two years ago, I returned to Atlanta to spend two years at the Boston Consulting Group, where I worked across about five different industries, but spent most of my time and energy doing research in Organizational Design Strategy where I built out a framework to explain the relationships between intra-organizational, microeconomic, and macroeconomic productivity.
My research for these next few years tears apart and then reweaves together the work I've done at BCG and LSE. I am evaluating and designing methodologies for affordance analysis of commercial platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. I'm loosely based in CSCW, where my collaborators and I leverage HCI and cognitive science to understand user-platform affordances, and then use sociolinguistics and political philosophy to critically analyze how specific features - like privacy settings - enable epistemic power for some, while constraining power for others.
Here’s an xMind I made a couple of weeks ago while I was trying to wrap my head around where my work seems to be headed. Happy to send this to anyone if you’re interested in actually reading it. May just need some time to clean it up for you first. It’s an outline of my theoretical framework with some references sprinkled in.
This work sits on the shoulders of living intellectual giants such as Jenny L. Davis, Andre Brock, Amy Hasinoff & Rene Bivens, as well as Tech's very own Carl DiSalvo. While my work is disciplinarily promiscuous, I'm committed to making political philosophy less intimidating and more useful to designers, researchers, and practitioners within the field of HCI. It’s a pleasure to meet you, I'd love to learn more about your work and how I might be able to be helpful!
Love what ur doing Kayla, so proud 🥹 Also funny reading your post and seeing baby Sarp hahah