I'm an oral storyteller so I usually begin my day by recording stories. That's my artistic, creative time. Then I come into work and meet my best friend. We talk a lot about what work we will do during the day, and this helps me plan.

Next, I usually do some writing on my thesis - this time, I'm typing into a personal computer. I'm a master's student here in MIT'S Media Lab. I studied at Massachusetts College of Art and took seven years off between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

Now I'm learning how to compute as well as learning about hardware.

I'm working on a project called story beads. Each bead is about one-and-a-half inches long and one inch wide. They can store digital images and text, so they're like little computers. They communicate with each other by infrared light. When they are put in their plastic casings and the lights are on. they look beautiful.

The beads can then be linked in a necklace and worn as an ornament. You can press a button on one bead and this passes the image on to the next bead and so on down the chain until it gets to a specific bead with a monitor through which you can view the image. So, you can walk around the world with all the images of things you care about strung around your neck.

For instance, you could put in an image of colourful butterflies and write "They flew over". This would be the start of your "flying story" and you could write as much text as you wanted. You can trade images with your friends. You have to have access to a computer to compose a story or put in an image, but once it's in the bead you don't need a computer to swap images or to view them.

I have three undergraduate students to help me with the project and we are testing it with pre-teen girls. I saw a gap about how girls deal with technology, and this should help them to relate to it in a way that they enjoy.

Sometimes I meet with the sponsors, the people who financially support the lab. I leave my technical studying until the evenings, when I study whatever the current thing is that I'm working on. I usually work 10 hours a day. The beads are the first prototype of something that will be half their size. They will have brighter lights and smaller batteries.

[Dan McGuire, an undergraduate working on the hardware, chimes in to say they "are already looking forward to making the beads wireless so that you could be sitting in Boston and you could tell a story to a person in Cork. We also hope to put video and sound on the beads . . . We don't want this to be a toy for the mega-rich, everybody should be able to tell stories. In the US, there's a real push to put one or two computers in classrooms, so kids could use these to input their stories. The beads would probably not be cheap, but the cost should fall over time."]

As a postgraduate student, I am paid as a research assistant. It's enough to live on. And if all that sounds boring, we do have fun on the weekends. We work hard and we play hard. And when I finish my masters I'm staying here to do a PhD.

As a person, I'm an artist who is interested in technology. I'm learning about computer science and engineering and hoping that it will all synchronise in my PhD.

In conversation with Anne Byrne