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‘More than a class project’: UMSI Expo features student innovations with social impact

Students standing in front of a trifold display in the ballroom of the Michigan League toss around a rugby ball

Tuesday, 04/30/2024

By Abigail McFee

To the onlooker, information science might seem amorphous — in part, because this essential and evolving field has so many applications. User-centered design? Check. Improving health care? Check. Guiding the ethics of artificial intelligence? Check. You’ll find this full range on display at the annual UMSI Student Project Exposition, which this year drew more than 250 guests to view 145 projects by students of the University of Michigan School of Information.

But the beauty of Expo is in its specificity. Here, onlookers are invited into the fold. 

You know the “Black-owned business” attribute that Yelp introduced in 2020 in response to calls for racial justice? Have you ever wondered what impact it actually had on Black-owned businesses? That’s an Expo project. Find it at Table 161, where Bachelor of Science in Information student Cameron Moy will share findings that might surprise you.

Undertaking an independent project advised by assistant professor Matthew Bui, Moy built a Yelp scraper to analyze roughly 300,000 reviews of Black-owned and non-Black-owned restaurants in Detroit and Los Angeles. He found that the Black-owned attribute did increase the visibility of these restaurants on the Yelp platform. 

“However, this increased visibility was not necessarily good,” Moy notes. “As Yelp is a predominately white and Asian community, the increased visibility within the universalized consumer space actually had a negative impact on these restaurants’ overall reputation that we measured through average star rating.” 

On average, the Yelp ratings of Black-owned restaurants in Detroit and Los Angeles declined after the “Black-owned business” tag was added to their pages. A novel design intervention that Yelp created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement ended up having a “disparate impact,” Moy says. His project earned second prize in the diversity, equity and inclusion category of the Expo awards. 

If you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t a simpler solution for keeping track of student loans — some kind of innovation to make a decades-long process friendlier and increase financial literacy — there’s an Expo project tackling that issue, too: Proceed to Table 93. 

Gradify

Kaitlin Baer and Duey Smith demonstrate Gradify to Expo guests.
The app aims to provide guidance for the student loan journey.

For their UX research and design mastery course, Master of Science in Information students Duey Smith, Kaitlin Baer, Quyen Hoang, Marjunique Louis and Whitney Speck created an app prototype called Gradify. “It’s a student loan app that evolves and changes with you,” Smith says, whether the user is an incoming first-year student or a working professional. 

In the U.S., 43.6 million people have federal student loan debt, and many haven’t received proper education around borrowing. Gradify aims to help users navigate their student loan journeys. Using the app, they can calculate loan projections, view upcoming payment deadlines and access resources for microlearning. 

The project resonated with Expo guests, including a U-M staff member who said that if the app evolves beyond a prototype, it would be of great interest to the university and great use to students. 

“We built something that we would use, to address a problem we all have,” Smith says. “Hearing that it is desirable and useful, beyond us, has been a great experience.” 

Full circle, and full speed ahead

Expo inspires a particular energy, not only day-of but whenever it is mentioned — like the Indy 500 of information science at U-M. It is a celebration of the significant projects UMSI students have undertaken during the academic year, through client-based courses, programs like Civic User Testing Group and Alternative Spring Break, and independent endeavors.

What I’m very impressed with is the quality of the projects. Some of them are really industry-level designs and solutions.

An alumna wearing a judge badge speaks to a student in the Michigan League during UMSI's student project exposition
Bhavyasree Rallapalli speaks with Marta Rey-Babarro about her team's project Guardian Care, an AI companion system for senior living enrichment.

Top projects earn awards in course-specific and thematic categories, judged by a panel of UMSI alumni and industry experts. For Marta Rey-Babarro (MSI ’05), a member of the UMSI advisory board and vice president of research and insights at Zillow, serving as an Expo judge was meaningful on multiple levels. 

“It’s really cool to be here, because 18 years ago, I was on the other side,” she says. “Now, coming here as a judge is almost like coming full circle. What I’m very impressed with is the quality of the projects. Some of them are really industry-level designs and solutions.” 

Before graduating, all BSI students are required to complete a final project with an external client. Zoe Zhang, Angel Huang, Jack Mintzer and Caira Blevins collaborated with Toyota to revolutionize the trailer hitching process, earning first prize in the BSI capstone category. 

“The team worked hard to understand key challenges of their project and developed creative solutions,” says associate professor Florian Schaub, who teaches the BSI capstone course. “They even spent time at a trailer rental place to study how people struggle with attaching trailers and to understand the process.”

Jack Mintzer, Zoe Zhang, Angel Huang and Caira Blevins collaborated with Toyota on a novel feature.
Jack Mintzer, Zoe Zhang, Angel Huang and Caira Blevins collaborated with Toyota on a novel feature.

This undergraduate team created a novel feature: a user-friendly app prototype that provides step-by-step visual instructions and real-time feedback to ensure the trailer is aligned correctly. 

“The most meaningful part is to see all the work that we’ve done in the classroom, behind closed doors, come out for everyone to see and judge,” Blevins says. “And just to see our classmates’ projects in person is kind of amazing. To see it start from scratch and turn into a whole trifold.” 

Blevins had taken auto UX courses at UMSI before landing with Toyota as a client in her BSI capstone. “It was a perfect match, honestly,” she says. 

A community effort

This is a key piece of Expo: Many of the projects that UMSI students pursue are in partnership with real clients sourced by the Engaged Learning Office. Some of these organizations and companies are Ann Arbor or Michigan-based, while others are located across the country and across the globe. 

“It’s a wonderful thing for the University of Michigan to be reaching out to communities in this way,” says Mary Pedley, assistant curator of maps at U-M’s William L. Clements Library, who attended Expo as a guest. She was most struck by the Hussey Room of the Michigan League, where students of digital curation, librarianship and archival practice presented projects from their mastery courses. 

“I could see that School of Information students were offering such constructive and helpful advice to small, local institutions that have significant collections but not the staff capacity or training to know what to do with them,” she says. “Students really give them effective plans, and it’s information that is free.”

Two students speak with a professor in front of a trifold poster in the Michigan League.
Hailey Glushyn and Emily Fulling speak with clinical professor of information Kristin Fontichiaro about their catalog of the Meredith Bixby Collection.

No strings attached — unless you wander over to Table 145, where you’ll find an antique marionette on display. This is just one of more than a hundred marionettes crafted by Michigan puppeteer Meredith Bixby, who toured the Midwest for four decades with “Meredith Marionettes Touring Company,” performing in schools, theaters and community centers.  

In collaboration with the Saline Arts and Culture Committee, MSI students Hailey Glushyn, Isaac Burgdorf and Emily Fulling created a comprehensive catalog of Bixby’s handmade puppets, set pieces and props. 

Bixby left this collection to the City of Saline before his death in 2002, with the intention that it be on display to the public. The Bixby museum, which was beloved by many locals, closed in 2008. But the goal is to reopen it, and the UMSI team’s recommendations have laid an essential foundation. 

“One of the most fun aspects of the project was trying to figure out which marionettes and props were used in which play,” says Fulling. The team read interviews and oral histories, spoke with community members, and spent hours watching videos of performances and spot-finding objects. 

The marionette they displayed at Expo became a conversation piece, drawing community members who had a personal connection to the collection. 

“We had a lot of different people come up and say, ‘Oh, I know what this is. I went there with my kids,’ says Glushyn. “They’ve felt like it was a really good thing that we put love and care into this.” 

For the collection’s caretaker, Katherine Downie, who is also a lecturer at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, the team’s impact was greater than the sum of its puppets and props. 

“This group was so enthusiastic about completing the catalog, which is something we’ve been wanting for seven years now,” Downie says. “It felt like something that would never happen, and they pushed really hard and got it done. I’m just blown away.” 

Sustainable solutions

Expo participants are entering a field that is powerful and pliable enough to address socioeconomic inequities and the climate crisis, and their projects rose to these challenges.

This year, UMSI introduced an award category to recognize projects related to water conservation and access, in alignment with UMSI’s 2023-2024 theme year

For her virtual reality rain garden simulator, MSI student Faith Gowen earned second prize. The goal of her project was both environmental and educational. Rain gardens capture stormwater runoff and filter it through the soil, keeping pollutants from reaching local rivers. They can be planted by anyone in a residential yard, with the right training. 

Gowen’s project, developed in collaboration with Washtenaw County, gives users an immersive opportunity to walk through each step of the process of building a rain garden, and to observe the differences in an Ann Arbor yard that has a rain garden vs. one that does not. 

“I wanted to have VR be the storytelling element that helps people have access to water conservation,” Gowen says. “The public sometimes has limited exposure to scientific data. It’s not always in an accessible format. VR is really good at this.”

A student speaks with an Expo guest in front of a trifold poster about expanding clean water access for the homeless community.
Alexandra Balmaceda speaks with an Expo guest about her project on expanding access to clean water for the homeless community.

MSI students Alexandra Balmaceda and Nina Chen, who earned first prize in the theme year category, were motivated by increasing access to clean water for the homeless population.  

They developed a prototype for a web-based application, “Where’s the Water?,” that can be accessed from any platform, including a public library computer or a user’s phone. It maps nearby clean water sources, including drinking fountains, showers and “friendly businesses” that provide restroom access without a purchase, while allowing users to filter the displayed options based on their needs. 

In order to design this tool, Balmaceda and Chen spoke with more than 15 members of the homeless community in Ann Arbor. They learned that resource-sharing about reliable water sources often happens by word of mouth. In response, they designed “Where’s the Water?” as a crowd-sourced platform, allowing users to add new sources to the map. 

When asked about next steps, Balmaceda responds passionately, “We want to launch this. This has become much more than just a class project for us.”

The team submitted to the student design competition hosted by the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI conference and were selected as finalists. They will be presenting at the conference in May, where they hope that having greater reach might help them secure funding and developers.

Once developed, “Where’s the Water?” would launch in Ann Arbor, where the research is rooted. “But over time, with more research and being able to add translation options, we’re hoping it can spread across Washtenaw County, the state, the nation and — long term — even the world,” Balmaceda says. “Because we want to be able to help as many people as possible.”

This is the energy of Expo: Students share an enthusiasm that extends beyond their course requirements, and onlookers walk away from tri-fold posters realizing they just saw something real. They just saw change in the making. 

Funding for the 2024 UMSI Student Project Exposition was provided by the estate of Gerald P. Miller (AMLS '86, Ph.D. '95), the UMSI Miller Scholars Fund and the UMSI Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Fund.

Lead image: Samantha Lawrence, Abir Ahmed, Meera Agrawal and Jordan Brookstone toss a rugby ball during the UMSI Student Project Exposition. The group worked with the Atlanta Youth Rugby organization to redesign their website.

LEARN MORE

Explore degree programs at the School of Information.

Organizations from all industries and sectors are invited to propose information-based projects for students to work on through capstone projects, client-based courses and community-based programs. Host a student project