MCLab Profile: Claude Fortin, PhD Student
An interdisciplinary scholar, Claude has come to SIAT’s Making Culture Lab to study large interactive digital public displays and screens in urban environments. The past 10 years have seen a sizeable body of research adopting a technical approach towards the design and development of this new media platform, but Claude is interested in contributing to this field of research by studying its aesthetic and social potentials. Her engagement with social interaction design builds on a solid foundation of academic studies in the humanities, social sciences and fine arts (theory and praxis), a college degree in pure and applied sciences, and a 2-year technical diploma in ceramics design. Over the past 20 years, she has acquired hands-on technical experience and theoretical expertise with image-based technology. Her master’s thesis was an empirical study in the areas of visual rhetoric, social theory and the history of journalism. Interested in the relationship between new media technologies, community-based spatial practices, and the production, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage, Dr. Kate Hennessy’s Making Culture Lab is naturally the research beehive best suited to her work.