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Design Student of the Month - Dominika Ruszkowski

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There are a lot of creative students in Canada who are doing innovative work to improve people's life through interactive, visual, informational, and other aspects of User Experience Design. I invited them to introduce who they are and share their work with you. To nominate a Design Student of the Month, email us. The Design Student of the Month for December 2009 is Dominika Ruszkowski . Congratulations!! Let's hear from Dominika.

Design Student of the Month logopicture of Dominika Ruszkowski

Who’s Dominika?

Hello! :) My name is Dominika Ruszkowski and I am master's student at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

My favourite aspect of computer science is human-computer interaction, because of my passion for design and problem solving. The greatest satisfaction of human-computer interaction is to see that the user is happy with the end result.

Apart from school, I am an avid figure skating fan and a member of the University of Toronto Blues Varsity Figure Skating team.

What cool stuff is Dominika doing?

a picture showcases performing zooming in PowerPoint on a HP TouchSmart running Windows 7

My research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on interactive techniques for the typical computer user in emerging computing environments such as multi-touch enabled display surfaces. My inspiration for this line of work steamed from one of my co-op terms where I interned with Microsoft on the Windows 7 Touch team. Being able to analyze and fine-tune the interaction techniques for the touch platform for Windows 7 was both exciting and very fun. Thus when I started my Masters I was very excited about researching interaction techniques in more depth, specifically utilizing mouse and touch together on a desktop computer (the picture showcases performing zooming in PowerPoint on a HP TouchSmart running Windows 7). The impact of my work will be beneficial for future designers as a baseline of understanding which interaction techniques are best used for specific environments.

What are Dominika’s plans after graduation?

After graduation I plan on going into industry and pursuing a user-experience related position. I am not your typical computer science student, as I really enjoy talking with users, fine-tuning requirements, and designing interfaces, then handing it off to development. Therefore user-experience is a very nice fit for me.

Want to learn more about Dominika?

My online portfolio can be found at https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~druszkow/ . You can drop me an email at dominikar@gmail.com

Technorati Tags: StudentoftheMonth,Canadian,HCI,Univeristy of Toronto

 

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 25, 2009
    I am very proud od your accomplisments. I still do not understand why you want to get up @4:30 AM to go skating before your research job/studies. All the best in 2010, may your dreams be reallity.