HOUSE is a multidisciplinary design studio founded by Jenny Rodenhouse, an interaction designer, researcher, and educator whose material is the verb, the action exchanged between a person and a computer. Her work spans interactive software, video, installations, and curricula that examine the semiotics of action and how computation shapes the way we perceive and inhabit the world.  She is Associate Chair of the Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Undergraduate Interaction Design at ArtCenter College of Design, and serves as Faculty Director of the Immersion Lab, where she expanded access to emerging media and created pedagogy on understanding technology as a creative medium. She teaches as Associate Professor in Undergraduate Interaction Design and Graduate Media Design Practices at ArtCenter, is a part-time Lecturer in the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

She graduated from Syracuse University's five-year Industrial and Interaction Design program (BID) and received her MFA in Media Design from ArtCenter College of Design. Previously an interaction designer at Microsoft Research, Xbox Entertainment and Devices, and Windows Phone Advanced Development, she worked on the first Windows Phone platform, explored the future of transmedia entertainment, prototyped emerging gestural interactions, designed and shipped the Xbox 2011 interface, and built cross-platform social experiences for MSR and Xbox Live.


Publications: (1) Manual Dexterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input, CHI 2010: I Need Your Input. (2) Pen + Touch = New Tools, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Alt.chi Paper. (3) Mixsourcing: Exploring Bounded Creativity as a Form of Crowdsourcing, Published by ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Jury Chair for Core77 Design Awards, a Fellow at Nature, Art, & Habitat Residency in Sottochiesa, Italy, and a Postgraduate Research Fellow at Media Design Practices, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Her work has been shown at art, architecture, and design events including the Gaming episode of Netflix's The Future Of; the Venice Architecture Biennale; the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles; Dutch Design Week; Die Digitale; DDDD; Spring Break Art Show; FEMMEBIT; Navel; Roger’s Office Gallery; IxDA 2019; The Swiss Architecture Museum; Architektur Galerie Berlin; BODY and the Anthropocene; the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture; Open City Art City Festival at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Post-Internet Cities Conference; The Graduate Center for Critical Studies; KAM Workshops: Artificial Natures; and CHI. Her projects have been featured in Wallpaper, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, and Anti-Utopias.
Contact: house@jennyrodenhouse.com

Verb List
2026, WIP





Associate Chair IxD BSc  

 ArtCenter College of Design

Consulting w/ Microsoft  

 Exploring the future of AI and mixed reality

Wreck a Nice Beach 
2025, Voice User Interface, Unity, Video, Interview with Crazy Minnow Studio, 6:05
We read mouths. We interpret them. We design them. We have programmed them to behave in specific ways. Wreck a Nice Beach is a voice user interface that treats the mouth as a visual language, using lip-synchronization software to approximate speech as shape. The interface employs audio amplitude and phoneme detection to generate visemes, the visual counterparts of phonemes. By intentionally misaligning sound and shape, the work produces new facial expressions, meanings, and modes of communication, exposing the gap between what is said and what is shown.

Ventriloquy, making one's voice appear to come from somewhere else, is a useful description of what all lip-sync software does. The video is built from an interview with Crazy Minnow Studio, creators of SALSA Lip-Sync, an animation tool used to puppeteer character mouths in video games and 3D simulations. The tool's own creators are ventriloquized by their software, their voices translated into computational gestures that both mimic and distort human expression. Phonemes are deliberately reassigned to mismatched visemes: an 'm,' which should produce a closed, flat mouth, is mapped to an 'o,' triggering a jaw-expanding shape instead. Familiar words produce unfamiliar faces. The mouth becomes legible as a designed object, shaped by assumptions about how speech should look.

The title, Wreck a Nice Beach, comes from a well-known failure in early speech recognition. Systems that parsed phonemes consistently heard "recognize speech" as "wreck a nice beach." That mishearing captures something essential about how machines process voice: through approximation, pattern matching, and inference, not fidelity. The lip-sync system in this work operates through the same logic, translating sound into shape through computational models of expression. From the vocoder's error to the viseme's approximation of an 'e' like smile, machine-mediated speech has always been a site of translation, not transmission. As AI-driven systems increasingly speak on our behalf in games, virtual production, and social media, the cultural and aesthetic assumptions embedded in those translations become urgent questions. Communication technologies, particularly AI-driven interfaces, function as interpretive systems, not transparent channels. When software speaks for us, it doesn't just represent us. It redefines what expression, agency, and presence mean in digital environments.

Thank you to Crazy Minnow Studio  

 FINAL VIDEO
Video excerpt
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Unity prototype
Unity simulation - waiting mode when no audio is present
Still from Unity simulation

Dent
2024, 3D Interface, Typeface Generator 


A playable type generator created in Unity. Throw balls at the letter form to create creases and folds, deforming the meaning.

FINAL 3D Interface, Unity
Letter pile
Letterforms generated from a play session
Generated letterforms

Everything as Input  2022, Graduate Studio Course, Meta Reality Labs, Media Design Practices, Immersion Lab, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, 


Teaching Team — Jenny Rodenhouse, Ben Hooker, & John Brumley    TA — Alan Amaya    Meta Reality Labs, University Collab Program — Michael Ishigaki, Roger Ibars, Aaron Faucher, Ata Dogan
Collaborated with faculty Ben Hooker and Meta Reality Labs to create a graduate studio that critically interrogated the future of augmented reality interfaces. Computer vision is a computation perspective trained to identify and interpret our environment through pattern-making, sensing, and tracking. This algorithmic point of view has transformed our visual field into new forms of machine sensing and controlling, turning everything within its field of view into an input that designers need to learn to create for and interact with. Together with Meta Reality Labs, we examined the applications and implications of augmented reality and computer vision around these 3 subjects: Perception, Privacy, and Power. Students trained custom computer vision models and researched the semiotics of datasets. 

Talking to Things 2024 - Ongoing, Dataset, Microscope, Video with Lambda Vue 


How do computer vision systems perceive and reconstruct speech from material vibrations, and what does this reveal about the ways AI translates between physical motion, sound, and language? When machines perceive our voices through matter, what new forms of communication and miscommunication emerge?

Computer vision models can recover speech from the subtle vibrations of objects. Using Lambda Vue, a software that amplifies minute motions in video, and a microscope, Talking to Things captures microscopic voice markers from material vibrations. In this case study, tinfoyl (a phonetic writing of tinfoil) is spoken to a sheet of foil, generating a visual dataset that maps graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds).

Talking to Things examines AI-mediated perception and computational sensing, exploring how machines “see,” “hear,” and “understand” the world through data. Computer vision systems capable of recovering speech from visual motion signals a shift in how communication is conceived: language becomes a physical event, and matter itself becomes a communicative surface. It asks what kind of “listening” occurs when AI detects voice through the movement of materials, and how such systems extend or displace human sensory perception.

By observing how computer vision detects and amplifies microscopic vibrations, the project found that machines treat physical motion as a kind of language—translating the invisible resonance of voice into visual data. These transformations expose the interpretive and speculative nature of machine sensing: AI does not simply capture speech but infers and imagines it, piecing together traces of motion and pattern to produce a voice.

In this way, technology becomes both translator and storyteller, reframing communication as a negotiation between signal, noise, and imagination. Technologies of perception do not just extend human senses, they invent new ways of speaking altogether.

With Caro Trigo, Mavis Yue Cao, Christie Wu

Video that visualizing the vibrations of speech. Saying tinfoil over tinfoil. Before and after Lamda Vue software processing
Tinfoil grid to define spoken phenomes and visual letters.
Separating each frame and phenome
TYPE SPECIMEN - Tinfoil
‘T’ frames
Identifying ‘T’ sound markers and characteristics in the material
Selecting high contrast markers for each phenome
Identifying sound markers and characteristics in the material
Sound markers
Microscope setup
Microscope setup in Immersion Lab
Video that visualizing the vibrations of speech on a strawberry.  

Player Non Player 2024, Seminar Course, History and Theory, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles, CA,


Teaching Team — Alice Bucknell & Jenny Rodenhouse Created a graduate History and Theory seminar in collaboration with Alice Bucknell, for Southern California Institute of Architecture. The seminar explored the game engine as a perceptual platform that turns the world into an interface where everything within its field of view is playable. Toggling across histories and philosophies of interaction design and their simulated architectures, Player Non Player roams game systems, semiotics, and the ever-dissolving boundary between player and NPC. Across reading presentations, discussions, game jams, and writing exercises, students examined the tactical possibilities and semiotic strangeness of game engine interfaces. The seminar supplements theory with practice, where students experimented with writing their own game worlds and interactions through a selected verb as new game mechanic.

Parade Town 2021, 3D Animation and Video, 0:42, ArtCenter College of Design, DTLA, Los Angeles, CA

The project investigates the history of parades as promotions of unrecognized communities and declarations of desired power. Using augmented reality and computer vision, the projects celebrate the seen/unseen activity and expressions of downtown Los Angeles.

Taught students to create augmented reality lenses using custom computer vision models. Students used machine learning and data training as a visual anthropology study of the city. The course culminated in a public exhibition in downtown Los Angeles. Visitors used QR codes to launch individual student projects and trigger digital overlays that called attention to objects, scenes, or urban conditions selected by the student.

Designed 3D motion graphics and coded curtains to promote student exhibition and course Parade Town: A procession of augmented realities in DTLA.  Motion graphics produced in Unity, a game development engine, to simulate the behavior of augmented reality, hiding and revealing the title of the exhibition. 

Designed curtains with QR codes as a checkered textile pattern. Codes hosted augmented reality exhibition, launching individual AR projects during gallery pandemic closure. 

Work by — Alan Amaya, Jeremy Yijie Chen, Shiyi Chen, Dunstan Christopher, Elizabeth Costa, Noah Curtis, Cha Gao, Jingwei Gu, Sean Jiaxing Guo, Kate Ladenheim, Miaoqiong Huang, Blake Shae Kos, Jeung Soo Lee, Hongming Li, Tingyi Li, Fuyao Liu, Guowei Lyu, Yiran Mao, Elaine Purnama, Mario Santanilla, Qi Tan, Lucas Thin, Zeyu Wang, Zhiyan Wang, Zoey Wang, Christie Wu, Yue Xi, Haoran Xu, Qianyue Yuwen, Fanxuan Zhu

Exhibition and Teaching Team — John Brunley, Ben Hooker, Jenny Rodenhouse, & Christina Valentine

 FINAL EXHIBITION GRAPHICS Song credits: Hollywood Freaks, Beck
FINAL EXHIBITION Videos split across two screens, left and right windows of gallery
FINAL CODED CURTAINS Scanning QR codes to launch and view augmented reality projects
DTLA Opening
Simulated parade of pedestrians hosting title and letterforms.
Type motion created from dancing motion capture
Video still
Video still
Coded curtains detail
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Curtain  mockup created in Unity
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Exhibition project: Resting Spaces,  Yiran Mao
QR code pattern study
Exhibition project: Coffee Shop Scooter: The Portable Gentrifier, Blake Shae Kos
Curtain pattern studies
Parade of Carrying by Yining Gao
Exhibition project: Custom dataset of ‘unlucky’ signifiers in DTLA for Parade Your Luck by Hongming Li  
Cruising dataset,  Alan Amaya

Course — IxP1: Intro to Prototyping 2024, Studio Course, Interaction Design, Immersion Lab, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Redesigned our first term introduction to prototyping course, IxP1 introduced students to designing interactions through code. Drawing parallels between visual design and programming, the studio taught students the foundations of design and human-computer communication to create a visual system of words, letters, figures, shapes, or other symbols that convey meaning to both humans and machines. In this course, students learned to design through iterative prototyping to develop their skills in creating live, time-based interfaces.  The studio presented a series of programming languages and tools (p5.js, Protopie, and Unity). Students designed a series of actions and graphical control systems.

Immersion Lab

2016 - Ongoing, Lab & Pedagogy, Faculty Director, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Started the Immersion Lab 8 years ago at ArtCenter as a space that provides equal access to emerging technologies for art, design, and research. 

Conduct design research on emerging technology through hands-on prototyping in support of cross-disciplinary course programming, IxD curriculum, and design education materials (lectures, workshops, tutorials).

Developed Technology-Centered Design Research methodology as a design research approach and communication strategy for students. It is a primary research method of understanding emerging technologies and mediums through investigative making to inform UX and 3D interaction design opportunities.  

Curate hardware and software library for investigative study - AR/VR, computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D engines, motion capture, spatial computing, and scanning. 
     
Collaborate across ArtCenter departments and with visiting Industry sponsors to create relevant courses that communicate to a diversity of students, learning types, and skill levels.

Sponsors/Partners — Patagonia, Meta Reality Labs, Unity, Leap Motion, Google Daydream, Gravity Sketch, HTC Vive, National Research Group, Oculus, Size Stream, and Snap Inc Research.

Immersion Lab Featured in Core77 — “ArtCenter's Jenny Rodenhouse on Integrating VR/AR Technologies into Design School Curriculum”. 
Tracking workshop, Virtual Furniture, Sam Giambalvo
Mixed reality lighting assignment, work by Feather Xu
3D scanning and rigging workshop in Unity, flowers dancing by Hans Jurisch
Motion capture
Mixed Reality furniture, turning a chair into a button assignment
Custom AR image trigger workshop, Applique project by Tianlu Tang & Christopher Taylor, Sponsored studio with Google Daydream team
Intro to Unity tutorial and workshop  
Studios and topics covered in lab
Immersion Lab talk, mixing and matching tech
Shooting student final documentation
Mixed reality safety, Sensewear by Isabel Li, Lucas Thin, Mingshan Wang, & Duoning Zheng
 
Intro to Unity non playerable characters, work by Isabel Li, Lucas Thin, Mingshan Wang, & Duoning Zheng
Digital Casting exhibition at ArtCenter DTLA featuring student work of emerging 3D scanning techniques
Human Factors in motion capture, using Kinect Azure
Students prototyping in lab
Learning from computer vision model, COCO
Everything as Input, using headset as camera to turn anything into an interactive input
Hosted livestream, a car that tours around student projects
Mixed reality tactility workshop  
18 — Raspberry Pi integration with Unity
Students working in lab
Virtual Campus course with CalTech in Second Life
Machined Influencers course poster
Highway as gallery space in Second Life
ARTV video exhibition graphics for hosted live stream of student work from Snap Research Creative Challenge studio  
Student prototyping frog tongue in Unity
Workshop with video grame actors

Intro to Mixed Reality 2018 - Ongoing, Studio Course, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Created this course 7 years ago, as one of the first courses to investigate creative opportunities with emerging spatial technologies. This course is an introduction to mixed reality, spatial interaction, and design development workflows in Unity. This seemingly new field of ‘mixed reality’ builds upon the history of human-computer interaction, designing the ability to craft and control digital information with the human body. In this studio, we will use an array of mixed reality inputs (camera and sensors) and outputs (Unity) to create mixed reality objects that interweave digital and physical forms, senses, behaviors, and materials. Together we will utilize Technology-Centered Research methodologies to define an insight and design new ways of interacting with 3D space. 

Teaching Team — Jenny Rodenhouse & John Brumley

Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth

2019, Multi-channel Video Installation, 13:15, ETH Zurich, Marc Angélil, Department of Architecture
If we consider the historical globe as an early dataset—a material index of humanity's spatial, political, and cultural knowledge—how do contemporary planetary images from AI and satellites build upon or break from that legacy? In the transition from physical object to computational model, what is revealed about the relationship between technology, power, and how we imagine our place in the world?

Terrestrial Tales is a multi-channel video installation that explores how our understanding of the Earth has been shaped by evolving systems of data, visualization, and narrative. Drawing from a research archive of over one hundred historical globes by Marc Angélil and Carey Siress, the work examines the relationship between technology, representation, and humanity’s self-image.

The installation traces a visual genealogy of the planet, from hand-painted spheres to algorithmic renderings, revealing how each era encodes its worldview into the Earth’s image. Composed of 19 synchronized videos, the work weaves together historical documentation with contemporary media—juxtaposing sources as diverse as Bruno Latour’s lectures on Gaia and Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball—to explore how our perception of the planet oscillates between scientific model, ideological projection, and pop-cultural spectacle.

The project considers the globe as both an artifact and a dataset, a cumulative index through which humanity has sought to measure, contain, and visualize the world. Just as AI systems construct planetary-scale models through the accumulation of digital data, historical globes embody earlier attempts to totalize knowledge and assert control through representation. Together, these histories reveal that our maps of the earth are also maps of belief, each reflecting a distinct way of knowing, claiming, or imagining the planet. In an era of planetary computation, the project asks us to critically consider what kind of world is being constructed and by whom.

Introduction text — Marc Angélil Exhibition design — Ciro Miguel, Tobias Klauser in collaboration with Marc Angélil. Videos — Jenny Rodenhouse. Exhibition team — Marcin Ganczarski, Ellen Reinhard, David Roth, Cary Siress, Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz, and Leonard Streich.
FINALL INSTALLATION of 19 synced monitors
Monitor 1, Video, collection of representations of the globe over the last 2000 years
Wreckling Ball Interface, built in Unity.  Use Miley Cyrus ‘Wrecking Ball’ image used to browse history of globes
Swing to play interface built in Unity, Miley Cyrus ‘Wrecking Ball’ image used to browse history of globes
Installation at ETH Zurich, photography by Ciro Miguel
Video stills from monitors 1-19
Clip installation simulation in Unity
Opening of exhibition, photography by Ciro Miguel
Terrestrial Tales 100+ Takes On Earth, a book of essays by Marc Angelil, Cary Siress, Ruby Press
Clip installation simulation in Unity
Opening of exhibition, photography by Ciro Miguel
History of globes animated by excerpt of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball music video
Installation plan
Simulation sketch exploring alternative layouts.  Images/screens as globe textures. Drop simulations in Unity
Simulation sketch exploring alternative layouts.  Image archive as fabric textures. Drop simulations in Unity.

The Enchanted Forest 2017, Video, 13:15, Created at — The Nature, Art, and Habitat Residency in Sottochiesa, Italy Exhibited — We Are Here at A+D Museum LA CA 2024, The Other Art Fair 2021, FEMMEBIT Twitch Stream “Nature Club” 2020, Spring Break Art Fair, Los Angeles CA, 2020- FEMMEBIT Fest Los Angeles CA 2019, The Night Gallery Chicago IL 

“The International Space Station will be visible from Sottochiesa, Italy for 4 min. Max Height: 70 degrees, Appears: NW, Disappears: SE.” [Received Tuesday 11:57am, Wednesday 10:57am, Thursday 9:57am, Thursday 11:57am, Friday 10:57am…] -- Text Message from SpotTheStation

From satellite sensors to virtual reality content, forests are being scanned, replicated, and rendered to resolve our current climate reality and to escape into an entirely different one. The Enchanted Forest: Satellite Canopies & Digital Understories documents the movement of a forest monitoring sensor on the International Space Station ✞ and imagines how our networked landscapes, seasons, and internal bodily rhythms might be transformed by these new celestial technologies. 

Combining a site located in Sottochiesa Italy, interviews with Agronomist Patrizio Musitell, satellite locator applications, and popular VR forest environments, the short film proposes a 4-minute ecosystem that appears and disappears with the passing of the International Space Station ✞, our new artificial moon. Within each 4-minute scanning season (the average consumption time of a song or YouTube video), VR visitors migrate, drawn into the fleeting landscape.
 FINAL VIDEO
Video still
Layers
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Video excerpt
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Lidar scanning
Video excerpt
Site map
Video still
Included in book Transect of Coexistence
Exhibited at A+D Museum
Site location Sottochiesa Italy
Site tour and field recording

HOUSE — Jenny Rodenhouse

Designer — Educator
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