Rate My Professor Evan Barba

Evan Barba is an Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University, where he joined the faculty in 2012 and serves as Co-Director of the Iteration Lab. His academic background spans multiple disciplines: he earned a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an M.S. in Computer Science from New York University, and a Sc.B. in Neuroscience and an A.B. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, graduating with honors. Before entering academia, Barba worked in the film industry, advanced to General Securities Principal as a stockbroker on Wall Street during the transition to electronic trading, and contributed to startups, including developing a face recognition tool for out-of-home advertising that led to a U.S. patent application titled "System and method for monitoring viewer attention with respect to a display and determining associated charges" in 2008.

Barba's research focuses on systemic design and computing, information and communications technologies, human-machine interaction, extended reality, sustainable urban systems, and interdisciplinary education. He has collaborated with NASA's Satellite Servicing Projects Division on enhanced interfaces for tele-robotic servicing of orbital assets and leads projects including VR training for police and courtroom simulations with Georgetown Law Center, agent-based models for disaster response, and climate adaptation strategies. He received a National Science Foundation Sustainable Regional Systems Planning Grant and a Tech & Public Policy program grant. Barba chairs the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD12) symposium hosted by Georgetown in 2023 and co-develops iterative design methodologies in the Iteration Lab incorporating Six Sigma and I Ching techniques. Select publications include "Chores are fun: Understanding social play in board games for digital tabletop game design" (2011), "BragFish: exploring physical and social interaction in co-located handheld augmented reality games" (2008), "Pre-patterns for designing embodied interactions in handheld augmented reality games" (2011), "Young children’s mathematical learning from intelligent characters" (2020), and "Tangible media approaches to introductory computer science" (2015). His courses cover interaction design, game and simulation programming in Unity, tangible and embodied computing, sustainability theory and practice, and technologies of persistence addressing climate solutions and AI design.