E.M. resident has a solution for Hawaii

Hawaii spent a harrowing 40 minutes preparing for a ballistic missile attack on Jan. 13 after a misunderstanding between two emergency agency employees sent a false alarm to the state’s 1.42 million citizens.

The agency official who issued the warning was under the impression that Hawaii was in real danger, according to Hawaiian government and Federal Communications Commission. And due to increasing tensions between America and North Korea— so did the rest of the state.

Sarah Danseglio, an East Meadow resident in her second year at the Rochester Institute of technology, hypothesized that the problem stemmed from inadequacies in the Hawaiian agency’s user interface.

Danseglio studies New Media Design at RIT, which is an umbrella field that allows students to pursue visual design, user interface design, 3-D modeling, motion graphics and web design. In one of Danseglio’s classes she was given a task to design a new emergency user interface for Hawaii.

“As a college student I don’t really know what a government interface should look like,” Danselgio said. She added that, without access to Hawaii’s actual software, she had to imagine their user interface before determinig how it could be improved.

After completing her project, Danselgio submitted it to a contest on Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowd sourcing marketplace. Out of 320 entries, she won the $150 grand prize.

The experience, Danseglio said, reaffirmed her interest in designing user interface. She added that has always had a passion for graphic design, but her studies have opened doors to many different paths.

“I’m really interested in most of the areas of design that we go into,” she said. “It’s gonna be a little difficult for me to pick one specific direction going forward.”