Connor Rawls

Program Coordinator Senior, Co- Curricular Initiatives,

The GAME School

Other ASU affiliations

School of Complex Adaptive Systems

Mail code: 5802

Campus: Tempe
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Long Bio

Connor Rawls is the lead staff member for the ASU Esports Lounge, hosted by the GAME School in the University Gateway Building. Rawls and his team of student employees operate the lounge as a classroom, event venue and recreational space for all ASU students. Among the many weekly events hosted by Rawls and his students, their most recent was the AIA High School Esports Championships for Arizona on May 3rd, 2025.

Connor Rawls joined Arizona State University in 2017 as a member of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. As a staff member he has taken part in research activities focused on immersive media environments, media installations and embedded media systems. As part of his research activities Rawls has been part of the development teams behind COSMOS (shown at ZKM in Germany) and SERRA (Shown in Montreal, Canada). Rawls has participated on instructional teams teaching undergraduate students techniques for building engaging interactive media installations.

Education

B.A. Media Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Responsive Environments:
How do artists and designers create spaces that react to their users in ways that extend beyond binary logics and decision trees? Can we enrichen the spaces where people live and work by adding subtle digital characters who respond to occupants without the need for a discrete interface?

Media Choreography:
In what ways can a simple change in media completely alter the perceived theme or message of an exhibit? How can we design towards affecting a change in mood or emotion with interactive media without the need to modify underlying software functionality?

Publications

Publications

R. Bhushan, K. Kulkarni, V. Pandey, C. Rawls, B. Mechtley, S. Jayasuriya, C. Ziegler, "ODO: Design of Multimodal Chatbot for an Experiential Media System", Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2020.

B Mechtley, T Ingalls, J Stein, C Rawls, Sha X W, “SC: A Modular Software Suite for Composing Continuously-Evolving Responsive Environments,” in Proceedings of the Living Architectures Systems Group Symposium, Toronto, ON, 2019.

Evan Montpellier, Concordia University, Canada; Garrett Johnson, Arizona State University, United States; Omar Al Faleh, Concordia University, Canada; Joshua Gigantino, Assegid Kidane, Arizona State University, United States; Nikolaos Chandolias, Concordia University, United States; Connor Rawls, Todd Ingalls, Xin Wei Sha, Arizona State University, United States. "Suturing Space: Tabletop Portals for Collaboration", HCII 2015

Exhibited Works

SERRA : Vegetal Life Exhibition (2015 - 2018)
http://xprr.art/projects/serra/
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/vegetal-experience-serra/
https://serracreation.weebly.com/

ODO: Nobody Lives Here (2020)
https://zkm.de/de/media/video/no-body-lives-here-odo

Cosmos (2018)
https://zkm.de/de/media/video/cosmos

iMonsoon (2015) presented at the Conference on Complex Systems

Residencies

Improvisational Environments (2014)
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/improvisational-environments/

Research Activity

Telematic Embodied Learning
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/telematic-embodied-learning/

Participatory Sense-Making and Steering of Complex Systems
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/participatory-steering-of-complex-adaptive-systems/

Timelenses
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/time-lenses/

Cloud Chambers
http://synthesiscenter.net/projects/cloud-chambers/