Silhouette of Audrey Bennett cut out of black paper.
Logotype for Baohouse, Professor Audrey G. Bennett's virtual design studio, typeset in a script font.

BAO is a game played in Africa. Here it is used metaphorically to describe collaborative designing remotely. While other researchers have used the virtual design studio concept to represent computer-supported, cooperative work, these human-computer interactions are typically for professional projects (e.g., architects talking to architects). With Baohouse (pronounced Bauhaus), I aim to engage lay communities locally and remotely. It is an immaterial and motile space where I conduct theoretical and applied investigations on how “interactive aesthetics” can engage lay people with socially and environmentally transformative images that can yield cognitive and behavioral changes toward attaining equity and justice.