Noah Ratzan

Making place for conversation.

I build research programs and technical toolkits that improve social collaboration through place-based conversation.

Knowledge · Understanding · Response

My work sits between place-based learning, systems-engineering, and conversational ai, shaped by 18 years of experience working in education, design, technology, and design.

Research Programs

Local Conversation Studio

Place-based research on language, identity, and everyday interaction

Local Conversation Studio investigates how locals and visitors adapt to a place and negotiate language, identity, and knowledge through everyday interactions and conversation.

The work combines ethnographic field research and qualitative analysis with the design of small, analog interventions that facilitate in-person intercultural dialogue.

Local Conversation Studio diagram

Tools for Conversation

Infrastructure for capturing, encoding, and analyzing embodied interaction

Tools for Conversation is a methods and infrastructure research program focused on how conversational data is captured, processed, and reviewed.

Rather than treating conversation as text to be inferred, the program treats it as spatial, embodied, and multi-party, developing hardware and software tools that preserve these conversational features for more accurate and contextually aware analysis.

Tools for Conversation diagram