Over the last two weeks, Teesta Das, Yuchen Tong, Yang Qian, and I developed a discovery game build around the principles of Gestalt, and affordances and signifiers. We named our game Unfortunate Shapes. Description of the game: This is a discovery game, where the players build up a story of their wild adventure as they play! … Continue reading Game Design: Unfortunate Shapes Play-testing →

I sketchnoted several TEDTalks about death and dying. Here is one called Life that Doesn't End with Death, by Kelli Swazey. (How appropriate! Swazey... ghost... death... anyone?) This was a super fascinating talk about the culture in her husband's home in Indonesia, where the biggest social ceremonies are not weddings or births, but funerals. The … Continue reading Profesional Exploration: Sketchnotes →

Here are six exercises done over the week to jump into learning about game design: A sketchnote of Learning Game Design: Game Mechanics, by Sharon Baller. From The Knowledge Guru, July 2013. Ten games I played as a child hide and seek: it's social, thrilling, and demands creativity secret accents: this was a game I played with … Continue reading Game Design Week →

Currently the only free way to die is to donate your body to science. Unless, of course, you're too obese! Yep. You're dead, your soul has left your body (if you believe you had one), you're quickly becoming rotting meat, and the bills still don't stop. Your relatives, if you have them, will have to pay … Continue reading Professional Exploration: 15 minute post →

Since my professional topic of exploration focuses on the silence around discussions of death in our culture, I created several different visualizations of the topic to better understand the issue. Before starting these, I did some reading about how death became such a taboo subject in western cultures, which eventually lead me down the interesting … Continue reading Professional Exploration Mapping →

In picking an area for professional exploration, I wanted to find that thing that I couldn't not do. This is a common method I use to make tough decisions (I am not generally an efficient decision maker), because I often find that picking the option I think is right or makes more sense (in other words, the one … Continue reading Professional Exploration : The Process →

Topic of focus I'm using VR and robotics to explore how prototyping can help families with having difficult discussions around end-of-life care and death as a subject. Statement of interest Several things drove my interest in this specific topic. First, I learned about Caitlin Doughty and the death positive movement in 2015, and was immediately … Continue reading Professional Exploration →

This first sketchnote is from my design research class Design, People, Society during a talk about designing for inclusion (Minnie Bredouw): The second is from Communication by Design, during a brief overview of systems thinking (Laura Weiss and Sharon Green):

PROJECT TYPE: Designing for usability PROJECT GOAL: Redesign the software interface of the BART ticket kiosks, working with the constraint of the existing hardware. TIME FRAME: 3 weeks COLLABORATOR: Lili Ishida Although there are several different versions of the BART kiosks, some that take only debit, some that take only cash, some that only purchase … Continue reading Bart Kiosk Redesign: Complete Process →

The Importance of Side Projects, by Julie Zhuo