Valkyrie A. Savage

I invent, craft, and study delightful experiences.

My background includes a PhD in Computer Science (Human-Computer Interaction) from UC Berkeley, work at CERN, an internship at Google, teaching programming and electronics to learners of all ages, and creating real-world educational game experiences for a company I co-founded.

With a proven track record in research, visual design, physical design and fabrication, teaching, game design, electronics, product management, and coding, I enjoy projects which let me interlink multiple areas of practice.

I am open to work in near-future technical research, education, games, digital design/fabrication, and UX.

My thesis research, supervised by Björn Hartmann, focused on digital fabrication and how we can leverage its potential to make prototyping input devices a faster and easier process: this culminated in my dissertation, entitled “Fabbed to Sense: Integrated Design of Geometry and Sensing for Interactive Objects.” A video of my thesis presentation is also available online.

In the course of doing my own research, I supervised research projects for Masters students and undergraduates. I also taught UC Berkeley’s Introduction to User Interface Design course in Summer 2015 and redesigned the curriculum to incorporate a new technology, replace roughly half the lectures with a studio component, and fit with the summer session.