Tim Merritt is pursuing his PhD at the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering, where he is attached to the Partner Technologies Research Group. His thesis research focuses on understanding the HCI design space of biological materials intended to mediate intimacy.

Before joining NUS, he was a researcher in the Agora Game Laboratory at the University of Jyväskylä working on the Nordic Serious Games Project. Tim worked as a senior enterprise consultant designing, implementing and maintaining enterprise monitoring and management technologies and processes for Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Inc. He has obtained an M.A. in Digital Culture from the University of Jyväskylä, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Xavier University.

Tim occasionally blogs about his ongoing research and other interesting issues in BioArt.

Publications

  • Owen Noel Newton Fernando, Adrian David Cheok, Tim Merritt, Roshan Lalintha Peiris, Charith Lasantha Fernando, Nimesha Ranasinghe, Inosha Wickrama, Kasun Karunanayaka (2009): Babbage Cabbage: Biological Empathetic Media, VRIC Laval Virtual Proceedings, April 22-26, 2009, Laval, France. pp. 363-366.

  • Adrian David Cheok, Owen Noel Newton Fernando, Charith Lasantha Fernando, Kening Zhu, Nimesha Ranasinghe, Michelle Narangoda, Isuru Sawubhagya Godage, Roshan Lalintha Peiris, James Keng Soon Teh, Chamari Priyange Edirisinghe, Kasun Karunanayaka, Timothy Merritt, Dilrukshi Abeyrathne, Yukihiro Morisawa, Miyuru Dayarathna, Anusha Indrajith Withana, Nancy Lan-Lan Ma, Makoto Danjo, Junsong Hou, Wei Wang Thang 2009. Petimo: Safe Social Networking Robot for children. 8th International Conference on Interaction design and children (Como, Italy, June 3 - 5, 2009). IDC '09.

  • Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., O.N.N. Fernando, Peiris, R.L., Fernando, C.L., Empathetic Biological Media. Workshop "Programming reality: from transitive materials to organic user interfaces". The 27th Annual CHI Conference, Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2009 (Boston, MA, USA, April 4 - 5, 2009). Download

  • Khoo, E.T., Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Designing a Mixed Reality Intergeneration Entertainment System. Springer book chapter: Engineering of Mixed Reality Systems. 2009.


  • Khoo, E.T., Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Designing Physical and Social Intergeneration Family Entertainment. Interacting with Computers. Special Issue: Enactive Interfaces, volume 21, issue 1-2, pages 76-87, January 2009.


  • Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., 2008. Cute Engineering. In the proceedings of the 2008 Young Investigators's Forum on Culture Technology (KAIST, Korea August 22-23, 2008). YCT2008, KAIST, Korea 81-87.

  • Khoo, E., Merritt, T., Fei, L.F., Liu, W., Rahaman, H., Prasad, J., Marsh, T. 2008. Body Music: Physical Exploration of Music Theory. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames (Los Angeles, California, August 10, 2008). Sandbox '08. ACM, New York, NY, 35-42.

  • Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Shared Browser: When the web browser becomes a shared lens. In the forthcoming proceedings of the 2008 4th International Conference on Multimodality (Singapore, July 30, 2008). ICOM-4 2008.

  • A.D. Cheok, R.T.K.C. Tan, T. Merritt, O.N.N. Fernando, Y.P. Sen and D.T.K. Nguyen. 2008. Empathetic Living Media. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems DIS 2008, February 2008, Cape Town, South Africa, pp. 465-473.

  • Adrian David Cheok, Owen Noel Newton Fernando, Tim Merritt, and Chenxi Zhang, "Introduction to Kawaii Engineering: Analysis of Cute Interactive Systems," Proc. of the DIS2008 Workshop on Cute Interactive Media, Cape Town, South Africa, February 2008 (Online: www.cutemedia.org), pp. 4-6.

  • Adrian David Cheok, Masa Inakage, Masahiko Inami, Michiko Ohkura, Owen Noel Newton Fernando, and Tim Merritt, "Designing Cute Interactive Media," DIS2008: Designing Interactive Systems, Cape Town, South Africa, February 25th, 2008 Workshop.

  • Cheok, A. D., Inami, M., Fernando, O. N., Inakage, M., and Merritt, T. R. 2007. Explorations on interactive interfaces using cuteness. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Digital interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (Perth, Australia, September 19 - 21, 2007). DIMEA '07, vol. 274. ACM, New York, NY, 3-3.

  • Khoo, E.T., Merritt, T., Cheok, A.D., Lian, M., and Yeo, K., Age Invaders: User Studies of Intergenerational Computer Entertainment. Entertainment Computing ICEC 2007, 6th International Conference, Shanghai, China, September 15-17, 2007, Springer, Volume 4740, 231-242.

  • Merritt, T., Sullivan, H.T., Hackney, M.T., 2007. Accessibility Issues in Mobile Spatial Audio Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Singapore, September 9 - 12, 2007). MobileHCI '07. pp. 37-39.

  • Häkkinen, M.T., Sullivan, H.T., Merritt, T., 2007. Mobile Interfaces for Preparedness and Warning Information: Design Issues for People with Disabilities . In Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Singapore, September 9 - 12, 2007). Mobile '07. pp. 21.

Awards

  • Laval Revolution 2009 - Babbage Cabbage.

  • Laval Virtual Award 2009 - Babbage Cabbage.

  • Mindtrek 2008 Nokia Ubimedia Award. Third Place. Babbage Cabbage: Empathetic Biological Media.

  • 2nd Best Paper - Body Music: Physical Exploration of Music Theory. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Videogames (Los Angeles, California, August 10, 2008). Sandbox '08. ACM, New York, NY, 35-42.

  • Best Master's Thesis 2008 University of Jyväskylä, Department of Humanities.

Invited Talks / Panels

  • Merritt, T., Panel Discussion Speaker. Ludic Times: The Art of Gaming. The 6th Asia-Europe Art Camp. Singapore, 22 - 29 July 2008. Art Camp Website.

  • Biological Media. Techno Dreams Session. University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 10 October 2008.

  • Cute Interactive Media. Presentation as a panel speaker in the workshop. ICAT Workshop on Technologies for Entertainment, Art, and Culture. 17th annual Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence. Esbjerg, Denmark, 30 November 2007.

Teaching

Previously taught at University of Jyväskylä:

  • DGLS432 Physical Computing
  • DGLS433 BioArt: Review of Current HCI and Arts Research
  • DGLS463 Information Design