Alexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department in the College of Art, Media, and Design and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
Alexandra is an HCI researcher, racial justice activist, and transformational game designer. Her core research interests are in studying and designing social technologies that support the joy and empowerment of people of color and people in marginalizing contexts. She uses qualitative methods to gather counterstories and participatory methods to design for the future. She has designed award-winning transformational games, received multiple ACM Best Paper awards, is an NSF CAREER awardee, and is published at venues including CHI, UIST, CSCW, CHI PLAY, ToDiGRA, the Journal of Future Studies, FDG, and DIS.
Research/Publications Highlights
To, A., Smith, A. D., Showkat, D., Adjagbodjou, A., & Harrington, C. (2023, July). Flourishing in the everyday: Moving beyond damage-centered design in HCI for BIPOC communities. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 917-933). [BEST PAPER AWARD]
Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I. F., Smith, A. D., To, A., & Toyama, K. (2020, April). Critical Race Theory for HCI. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16). [BEST PAPER AWARD]
Zabala, J., Zvelebilova, J., & To, A. (2024, May). Queer TTRPGs’ Visibility, Safety, and Allegory as Resistance. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-10).
To, A., Carey, H., Shrivastava, R., Hammer, J., & Kaufman, G. (2022, April). Interactive fiction provotypes for coping with interpersonal racism. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-14).
To, A., McDonald, J., Holmes, J., Kaufman, G., & Hammer, J. (2018). Character diversity in digital and non-digital games. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 4(1).
Departments
Art + Design
Education
- Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University
- M.S. in Symbolic Systems, Stanford University
- B.S. with Honors in Symbolic Systems, Minor in Asian American Studies, Stanford University
Awards
- NSF CAREER
- ACM CHI Best Paper Award
- ACM CHI Honourable Mention Award
- ACM CSCW Best Paper Award
- ACM CSCW Award for Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion
- ACM UIST Best Paper Award
- ACM DIS Best Paper Award
- ACM FDG Best Paper Award
Research Focus
- Transformational game design
- Critical race theory
- Human-computer interaction
Courses Taught
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Rapid Idea Prototyping for Games
- Applied Game Design
- Mixed Research Methods for Games
