Managing the Professional Experiential Design Firm “Sensing Places”
Dr. Flavia Sparacino, augmented reality artist/innovator and entrepreneur
Monday, April 11, 2022, 5:00 P.M. EST
via YouTube Live
Co-hosted by DMD professor, Clarissa Ceglio, Communications major, Oliver Gilman , and Marketing and Spanish major, Yuliana Tsapar.
Flavia Sparacino, PhD will share her experience running experiential design firm Sensing Places, based in Santa Monica, California. Topics will range from initially establishing the firm, setting up the commercial practice, to client management, hiring, growing the team, and project management.
About the Speaker:
Flavia Sparacino is the founder of experiential design and technology studio Sensing Places, a visionary MIT spinoff that creates immersive spaces, transformational experiences and technology products for brands, agencies, theme parks and museums. Sensing Places was founded in 2006 in Santa Monica, California. It has contributed its expertise in innovation and groundbreaking technologies to landmark projects worldwide such as Zaha Hadid’s Daxing airport in Beijing, recently opened, and Gehry Partners’ 5.4 billion dollars design for Resorts World Sentosa. Recent projects span from a 10,000 sqf customer experience center for Vodafone, from ideation to build, to a computer-vision powered activation for the U.S. Open, and interactive theme park experiences for a large theme park.
Flavia is a pioneer and innovator in augmented reality and immersive environments. Her work on gesture control for interactive applications came five years before Spielberg’s Minority Report movie, as documented by the Discovery Channel feature on her work. She created live body-driven stage projections for dance and theater 12 years before Microsoft Kinect. Flavia also built wearable computers for museum visitors almost 10 years before the launch of Google Glasses. Her work has been displayed at MOMA, SFMOMA, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and Redcat Theater. Flavia’s work has been covered by The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Discovery Channel, France’s Arte, and Japan’s NHK television.
She is a regular speaker and panelist at conferences including the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) the Society for Experiential Graphic Designs (SEDG), Wonder Women in Tech, Ubicomp, ACM Multimedia and Virtuality. She received her PhD in Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Masters in Cognitive Sciences and degrees in Electrical Engineering and Robotics. MIT granted her a dozen technology licenses for her inventions, one of the highest numbers of intellectual property licenses ever awarded to one person. Flavia holds more than 1500 academic paper citations for her contribution to entertainment technology and immersive environments (source: Google Scholar).
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