MEICAN© research & play
Sydney, AU · 2026
Thinking, making, playing
Sydney,
For conversationsmema2458@uni.sydney.edu.au

Meican Ma

HCI researcher, builder & storyteller. 美灿

I’m an Honours student at the University of Sydney, currently supervised by Dr Zhanna Sarsenbayeva.

What we notice.
How we relate.
What we can do.

I build and study interactive systems to understand how designed signals become meaningful experiences—and how people can shape those experiences in return.

Enter the gallery

From art, through computing,
toward human experience.

My earlier studies at Bryn Mawr College introduced me to art history and visual communication. Computing gave me another way to work with those interests: I could build something people could enter, respond to, and change.

Now, as an Honours student at the University of Sydney, I’m interested in the moment a technical decision becomes part of someone’s experience. What does an interface draw attention to? What does an AI voice seem to mean? Where does a system leave room for a person’s own choices?

Storytelling is part of how I think, too. Designing a research system and building a game world both ask me to imagine what someone might do—and leave room for them to surprise me.

The thread through my work

Select a question to follow its connections into the projects.

How do interactive systems shape experience—and leave room for us to shape it back?

A vibration, an AI voice, a simulated character, or a piece of information is technically produced, but its meaning is experienced by a person. I ask how that meaning takes shape, and how design can support it while leaving room for interpretation and choice.

What becomes noticeable—and meaningful?

I start with what an interface makes available to experience: a tactile signal, a spoken sentence, a piece of information.

Perception ↔ Relation

Cues & expectations

How does a voice come to feel attentive, distant, or alive? How do our expectations of a relationship change the way we interpret those same cues?

What does this encounter mean to someone?

I ask how people experience a system as a coach, a character, or a listener—and what they come to expect from it.

Relation ↔ Agency

Care & choice

When does encouragement or companionship open possibilities, and when does it steer someone? How does the ability to refuse or redirect change the relationship?

What can a person choose, revise, or resist?

I am interested in the space people have to act on an experience, question a system’s judgment, and shape what happens next.

Agency ↔ Perception

Attention & possibility

What an interface makes noticeable shapes the choices in view. How can a person’s intentions, in turn, guide what the interface reveals?

What we choose changes what we encounter next.

Why these projects?

Each project makes a different part of this shared question tangible. I work across sensing, conversation, and play because each gives me a different way to examine how experience is shaped—and who has a say in shaping it.

Seven projects along one research thread

    These questions inform each other. Each project enters at a different point; the stage labels distinguish ongoing work and future directions.

    Thinking
    through making.

    I work across research design, system development, and interaction design. Building lets me turn a question into an experience; studying that experience asks me to reconsider what I thought I had built.

    1. Make the question tangible.A conversational agent, a sensory interface, or a playable world gives an abstract question a form someone can encounter.
    2. Listen for the difference.What the system does and what a person experiences can diverge. That gap is often where the more interesting question begins.
    3. Let the evidence change the work.I care about connecting design choices to what we can actually observe—and being clear about what remains unknown.

    Questions first.
    Projects to explore.

    The gallery brings together working systems, developing studies, and questions I want to carry into a PhD.

    Explore the work