What do you do when the world falls apart? Extinction Party is an educational puzzle game that explores the history of life on Earth by looking at the five major mass extinction events. It will take the form of a 3-foot high standing pentagon shape, with each side of the pentagon containing fun ways for participants to explore what life looked like before and after the extinction, and how why scientists think it happened in a certain way.
My thesis project is one side of this theoretical sculpture, which will be playable as a computer game. The game will be a proof of concept for a larger physical sculpture, which would be installed in a museum. I hope that both kids and adults will enjoy playing with it.
“School libraries exist throughout the world as learning environments that provide space (physical and digital), access to resources, and access to activities and services to encourage and support student, teacher, and community learning.”
– IFLA School Library Guidelines, 2015
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library is the main library at New York University, the core place where research takes place. Students and faculty visit the Bobst Library for their study and to interact with library functions as listed by the IFLA guidelines.
When I visited Bobst Library last semester, I had an unpleasant experience, where I spent a long time wandering around the library trying to find the right room and right bookshelf. There was no clear physical or digital way-finding indicator. This experience made me wonder if there are ways to help students and faculty navigate the library more efficiently. This marks the beginning of the project, Bobst.
Bobst focuses on the core function of the library, which is searching and finding a book.
The app shows you where to go and where to check, you can also keep and manage a record of the books you want. Furthermore, you can check the seat availability in the library to study. The original website asks users to open a new page to find book information, while the app’s intuitive user interface design reduces the steps it takes to find a book.
Form2Shape is built for digital designers who want to learn more about 20th century industrial design history. Since all digital designs ultimately extend into real life, I believe learning broader design principles ultimately will make better digital designers. In a world where designers share templates and assets over the internet, new projects rarely have to start from scratch. That led me to think that it might be possible to slip in a piece of design history education to designers during the asset hunting process. So I built a tool where designers can quickly find abstract shapes, customize and use them. The twist is that all the shapes are inspired by iconic furniture and product designs of the 20th century. I hope when they pick an arbitrary shape for the look, they would spend a minute learning about where it came from.
Programming languages are associated with utility and efficiency, but for decades, programmers have been exploring the bounds and definitions of programming languages through the creation of impractical, whimsical and absurd languages — designed not for their utility value, but rather the experience they propose. Much like the constraints and rules that writers and poets use to fuel creativity, these “esoteric” languages present constraints that create space for different kinds of thinking, and posit new ways of examining the communication between humans and machines.
Inspired by this rich history, in:verse is a programming language and development environment with embedded values that stand in opposition to the languages we are accustomed to; where poetry is code, random chance is valued more than precision, and telling a story is valued more than succinct, terse code. It is an experiment in engaging a broader audience in the speculations of what a programming language can be.
in:verse allows writers to create visuals with words, to mold the language to their liking, and to effortlessly explore unusual variations to their programs — with the assurance that their programs will never crash. It presents a writer with a puzzle in three parts — writing a shader, which requires a different mode of thinking than most computational drawing tools; using a stack-based programming paradigm, that is rarely seen in mainstream programming languages; and telling a story or writing poetry within these constraints.
in:verse encourages writers to build worlds in their minds as they write programs; to indulge in the practice of constraint-based writing; to explore new modes of collaboration; to forgo the need for speed and efficiency; and to embrace uncertainty and a lack of control.
https://inverse.website/
In our increasingly time-sensitive and quantified lives and societies, clocks have become smaller and embedded themselves in the fabric of our society through their presence in all manner of objects and infrastructure, big or small. From the pacemakers to refrigerators to satellites, their quiet ticks govern the contours of our lives and we, humans have internalized their logic into the self-management of our lives. But most of us forget that clocks are a measure of *a* system of time, not *the* system of keeping time. Humans construct most of their meaning in the world qualitatively rather than quantitatively. While clocks give us numbers that give us equally spaced markers in a day, we still relate it through the lens of the changes in the surrounding phenomena like the environment, our human rhythms, and social/personal rituals. Even though clocks stare at us from the corner of almost every digital screen all around us and yet, they are woefully inadequate in communicating a ‘sense’ of time. The number 3.30 PM makes sense only if we relate to its relative position in a day or the position of the sun in the sky or the activities that are associated with that hour or the specific needs our bodies have during that time of the day. And in case, the environments, rituals, and rhythms are disrupted, we lose our sense of time completely as evidenced by most of us during our current corona life. My thesis began as a rumination around my fractured sense of time that has evolved into a journey through a written article, built experiments that I have lived with, and where I seek to construct a sense of time for myself that is instinctive rather than quantitative. For my final thesis, I have built a collection of timepieces that create a ‘sense’ of time by qualitatively displaying time as interpretive changes in natural and digital phenomena in my personal environment. By exploring this space of abstracting and creating qualitative phenomena out of data and living with it, I wish to reexamine our relationship with quantification and what it means to have a sense of data and how we live in the world.
Artifice uses virtual reality technology to explore human connection.
Two players are invited to participate in Artifice. At the beginning of the experience, both players put on their VR headset in separate rooms. A narrator explains their individual missions. Player One is asked to serve as the judge to observe three robots' movements with the goal of identifying the other human player. Player Two serves as a performer in one of the robot avatar's body. Their crucial task is to perform different activities in the hope of demonstrating humanness and distinguishing him/herself from other pre-programmed robots.Hopefully this experience will spark a conversation about the reasoning behind their decision-making and share their uncanny valley experience together.
Artifice invites two participants to explore an alternate reality that takes place in a post-epidemic world.. At Artifice lab, a tech company provides a service allowing human consciousness to be uploaded to a robot. This service is often utilized by family members of the deceased who are not ready to let go of their loved ones. After consciousness is uploaded to a new body, the person no longer has to worry about aging and illness. However, there are overwhelming demands for this service. In the beta program, the company could only select a few candidates to be uploaded. The candidates need to go through quality control calibration to make sure they are able to maintain their human movement with their new robot body. The company selects judges to observe their movement and make a decision on who is the most human human deserving to go out of this lab with a new body.
A look at looking (through not looking) is an artistic research project that consists of three experiments that defamiliarize users’ predominant way of perceiving familiar contexts with other animals’ perceptual mechanisms.
Episode I. How does a dog understand a map?
A physical map of the ITP floor made from smells. Users sniff around the map to feel the spatial relation.
Episode II. How does a digital interface feel to a mole?
An AR application in which users are invited to experience the haptic texture of a digitally rendered blanket from artist’ childhood.
Episode III. What does /Apple Logo.jpg/ mean to a bat?
A VR experience in which users are embodied as a bat wandering in Time Square, trying to understand humans through echolocating.
Birds are everywhere in our cities. We eat chicken as food, keeping parrots as pets, and we see sparrows flying across the streets. Between all the living beings, birds are such a unique group of which that's so close to urban humans as three distinct roles: food, pets, and neighbors.
Though humans' needs for birds as products might never be gone, I hope one day all birds could just be flapping their wings as they're born to do. To achieve this wild goal, this interactive website – Chicken, Parrot, and Sparrow – is created to intrigue audiences to review and rethink why and how some birds are objectified as products, compared to the ones living as our neighbors, despite the fact that all of them are all birds born with wings.
Designed to target graphic design lovers, the backbone of this interactive website is a series of hand-coded typography animations consisting of the typeface Helvetica to visualize the processes of objectifying birds. In addition to the animations, the interactions and information on the website are designed and curated for audiences to keep thinking about our relationships with the birds after experiencing the website.
When was the last time you wished on a fallen eyelash or said bless you to someone who sneezed? Many of our commonly held beliefs are widely known to be irrational, not based on reasoning, fact or knowledge. Over time and across cultures, people have found ways to explain unexplainable things and to feel control over their fears of the unknown through seemingly random and arbitrary sayings and actions. Studies have shown that this kind of magical thinking decreases as we age.
Crazy Little Belief aims to recreate the whimsical aspect of our irrational beliefs in the world today that is often automated, machine-operated, and algorithmically optimized. My thesis project consists of three objects, the Cautious, the Visionary, and the Charming, each emphasizing the state of mind of people who believe in it. The purpose of this project is not to critique or dismiss these irrational beliefs and behaviors, but rather to encourage them and remind us that many of our beliefs are part of our culture and identity.
Electronics require an inordinate amount of material and labor to manufacture. From the mining sites to the clean room, there are thousands of hands, chemicals, and minerals that make a technological product possible. In the process of creating high technology there are significant amounts of waste generated that give rise to health and environmental issues. Waste and wasting happens throughout the manufacturing and supply chain, not just at the point of disposal. In addition, the infrastructure for discarding an electronic item consists of a multitude of processes and machinery. Few of our current disposal methods, including recycling, are optimal – our options take for granted the high labor, environmental, energy and health impacts required to create the technological products we've come to rely on.
The purpose of this project is not to condemn high technology, but rather to show the complicated movement of electronic materials and to empower others to imagine alternatives to this current cycle.