Julie Kientz

About

Julie Kientz is a Professor and the Department Chair in the Human Centered Design & Engineering department at the University of Washington. Her specialization includes human-computer interaction, interaction design with children, health and wellbeing technologies, computer supported cooperative work, gaming, and accessibility. As a faculty member, she contributes to advancing research and education in these areas, focusing on designing technologies that support health and wellbeing, particularly for children and diverse user groups. Her work integrates principles of interaction design and cooperative work to create accessible and engaging technological solutions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Public relations
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Developmental psychology
• Applied psychology
• Pedagogy
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Embracing Four Tensions in Human-Computer Interaction Research with Marginalized People

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2021 · 210 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Human-computer interaction has a long history of working with marginalized people. We sought to understand how HCI researchers navigate work that engages with marginalized people and considerations researchers might work through to expand benefits and mitigate potential harms. In total, 24 HCI researchers, located primarily in the United States, participated in an interview, survey, or both. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four tensions—exploitation, membership, disclosure,…

  DOI

• Parenting with Alexa: Exploring the Introduction of Smart Speakers on Family Dynamics

  2020 · 124 citations

  Smart speakers have become pervasive in family homes, creating the potential for these devices to influence parent-child dynamics and parenting behaviors. We investigate the impact of introducing a smart speaker to 10 families with children, over four weeks. We use pre- and post- deployment interviews with the whole family and in-home audio capture of parent-child interactions with the smart speaker for our analysis. Despite the smart speaker causing occasional conflict in the home, we observed…

  DOI

• Designing the Future of Children’s Mental Health Services

  Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research · 2020 · 120 citations

  Advancements in evidence-based psychosocial interventions, digital technologies, and implementation strategies (i.e., health services research products) for youth mental health services have yet to yield significant improvement in public health outcomes. Achieving such impact will require that these research products are easy to use, useful, and contextually appropriate. This paper describes how human-centered design (HCD), an approach that aligns product development with the needs of the people…

  DOI

• DreamCatcher: Exploring How Parents and School-Age Children can Track and Review Sleep Information Together

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020 · 80 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Parents and their school-age children can impact one another's sleep. Most sleep-tracking tools, however, are designed for adults and make it difficult for parents and children to track together. To examine how to design a family-centered sleep tracking tool, we designed DreamCatcher. DreamCatcher is an in-home, interactive, shared display that aggregates data from wrist-worn sleep sensors and self-reported mood. We deployed DreamCatcher as a probe to examine the design space of tracking sleep a…

  DOI

• Interactive Technologies and Autism, Second Edition

  Synthesis lectures on assistive, rehabilitative, and health-preserving technologies · 2020 · 43 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

Recent grants

• RAPID: Education, Work, and Life during COVID-19: Supporting Families at Home with Technology

  NSF · $125k · 2020–2022

• SCH: INT: Supporting Healthy Sleep Behaviors through Ubiquitous Computing

  NSF · $1.4M · 2014–2018

• CAREER: Healthy Families: Technology to Support the Health and Wellness of Young Children

  NSF · $520k · 2010–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Gregory D. Abowd

  Northeastern University

  52 shared

• Gillian R. Hayes

  University of California, Irvine

  39 shared

• Sean A. Munson

  37 shared

• Shwetak Patel

  University of Washington

  24 shared

• Matthew S. Goodwin

  Washington University in St. Louis

  24 shared

• Arpita Bhattacharya

  Seattle University

  22 shared

• Alexis Hiniker

  18 shared

• Alissa N. Antle

  Simon Fraser University

  16 shared

Labs

• Julie Kientz's Research Group ArchivePI

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2008

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2009)
• MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 (2013)
• UW College of Engineering Faculty Research Innovator award (…

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• David W. McDonaldh-54
• Leah Findlaterh-44