Keith Evan Green, R.A, Ph.D.

Keith Evan Green, Director of the ARL, is the Jean and Douglas McLean Professor of Human Centered Design (HCD) at Cornell University and professor in Cornell's Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and Graduate Field in Information Science (IS).

Green's Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL) imagines rooms and their furnishings as robots that enable, support, and augment inhabitants. The ARL designs "robot-rooms" and studies how these rooms partner with people and what people make of them and with them.

More broadly, Green's ARL generate new vocabularies of design and new understanding of human-machine interaction in the spatial realm: what is spatial physical-computing or what Green calls architectural robotics. In addition to numerous ACM and IEEE publications, Green’s book Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology (MIT Press) defines this emerging field at the interface of design, robotics, HCI, and psychology.

At Cornell, Green served as department chair and co-led the effort to create Cornell's Department of Human Centered Design, combining two smaller design programs. Green was previously at Clemson University (as tenured full professor in Architecture and ECE) and the University of Auckland (tenured in Architecture). Early in his career, Green directed Clemson's architecture program in Barcelona; later he became founding director of Clemson's Institute for Intelligent Materials, Systems, & Environments and its associated Digital Ecologies graduate concentration.

A professionally licensed, award-winning architect, Green received the Schiff Foundation Prize in Architecture and Design of the Art Institute of Chicago where his models and drawings are housed in the permanent collection of the Department of Architecture and Design.

Green earned B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Green has researched and/or taught for extended periods in Barcelona, Milan, Auckland (New Zealand), and Delft (Netherlands) where he was Visiting Professor at TU Delft's ID-StudioLab.

KEY PUBLICATIONS
Keith Evan Green. Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes, and Biology (MIT Press, 2016).

Ge Guo, Gilly Leshed, and Keith Evan Green. 2023. “I normally wouldn't talk with strangers”: Introducing a Socio-Spatial Interface for Fostering Togetherness Between Strangers. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA 20 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581325. [video]
HONORABLE MENTION BEST PAPER.

Schafer. G, Green, K. E., Walker, I. D., Fullerton, S. K. In Press. Words Become Worlds: The LIT ROOM, a Literacy Support Tool at Room-Scale. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 511-522. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196728. BEST PAPER. [video showing school kids in the LIT ROOM]; [time-lapsed video showing its assembly]

Houayek, H, Green, K. E., Gugerty, L. Walker, I. D. and Witte, J. AWE: An Animated Work Environment for Working with Physical and Digital Tools and Artifacts. In Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing [JPUC], June 2014, Volume 18, Issue 5, pp. 1227–1241. [video clip from IEEE that was on IEEE's homepage as a featured project]

Soleimani, A., Herro, D., Green, K. E., and Walker, I. D.2019.“CyberPLAYce – A Tangible, Interactive Learning Tool Fostering Children’s Computational Thinking through Storytelling. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, Elsevier, 20C, pp. 9-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2019.01.002. [video clip]

Threatt, A. L., Merino, J., Green, K. E. & Walker, I. D.  An Assistive Robotic Table for Older and Post-Stroke Adults: Results from Participatory Design and Evaluation Activities with Clinical Staff. In Proceedings of CHI 2014: the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pp. 673–682.
[30-second "Video Preview for this paper]; [ART's robotic surface - video]

Kocher, D. Crandall, C. Yuan, C. and, Green, K. E. GROWBOT: A Robotic System to Help Children Grow PlantsInteraction Design and Children. (IDC ’20 Extended Abstracts), June 21–24, 2020, London, United Kingdom. ACM 978-1-4503-8020-1/20/06. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397617.3402038. BEST DEMO PAPER. [video].

Yanik, P.M., Merino, J., Threatt, A.L., Manganelli, J., Brooks, J.O., Green, K.E. and Walker, I.D. A Gesture Learning Interface for Simulated Robot Path Shaping with a Human Teacher. IEEE Transactions on Human Machine Systems, 44(1): 41-54, 2014.

Z. Hawks, C. Frazelle, K. E. Green and I. D. Walker. Motion Planning for a Continuum Mobile Lamp: Defining and Navigating the Configuration Space. 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, 2019, pp. 2559-2566, doi: 10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8967841.

KEY PROJECTS COMPLETED
Informed by human needs, wants, curiosity, and a concern for our survival on the planet, the ARL focuses on applications that include: healthcare, creativity and learning, working life, autonomous vehicles and spacecraft, community and civic life, disaster relief, and mass urbanization. In designing for these, we dedicate ourselves to understanding populations sometimes overlooked by designers: children, adults aging in place, under-served communities, and individuals of all ages suffering from illness, disabilities, and the challenges of dislocation, disassociation, and relocation.

     
Animated Work Environment                       Assistive Robotic Table

     
LIT ROOM                                                       LIT KIT

    
home+                                                            Nonverbal Communication

    
ArchIbots Workshop at Ubicomp                  CyberPLAYce