(she/her/hers)
MIT CSAIL
Computer graphics, Human-computer interaction, Design tools
Mackenzie Leake is a METEOR postdoctoral fellow at MIT CSAIL. She received her PhD and MS in computer science from Stanford University and a BA in computational science and studio art from Scripps College. Her research focuses on designing computational tools for various creative domains, including textiles and video. Her research has been supported by Adobe Research, Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) fellowships, and she was named a WiGraph Rising Star in Computer Graphics in 2022.
Computational Tools for Efficient Design Exploration
Creative tasks often require practitioners to navigate a large space of options for each design decision. While some of this navigation may be essential exploration, some tasks can distract from the more important creative decisions. Computational tools have made the process of generating content much faster for a wide variety of applications, but navigating among the best designs efficiently remains an open challenge. In my research I develop tools that enable users to focus their attention on the creative parts of their process while offloading some of the tedious search processes to computational tools. I apply a combination of approaches from human-computer interaction and graphics to develop algorithms and systems to record, represent, and aid creative processes in domains, such as quiltmaking and video editing. Well-designed tools have the power to help users navigate design trade-offs more effectively, and in order to support this, we must understand existing craft processes and make it easy for users to express their design intentions. My broader goal is to further our understanding of how computation can better support open-ended tasks and extend our creative capabilities.