Last semester, I also built novel tangible user interfaces every week, learning not only how to design interactions but also how to test how intuitive they are. I engineered cuckoo-clock mechanisms, limping robots, and synesthesia-inspired musical sandboxes.

Some concepts are best expressed in video, so here's a link to some clips on Youtube.

I'm also a maker. You can catch me many mornings at the Jacobs Design Institute, hovering over laser-cutters and 3D printers. My small solo and team projects have ranged from Mother's Day wooden coasters to a 3D print of a hexagonal fused network.

I have presented at design showcases both at the School of Information and Design Institute. I use Illustrator, Autodesk 360, & Cura to model.

My roots in design trace back to digital art. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign have been my pixel playgrounds since the age of 7. Since then, I have used the Adobe Suite for everything from stat infographics to UI/UX mockups.

This is a potentiometer controlled LED lantern. Behind the scenes there is an Arduino, breadboard, and a circuit powering the color changes.

In the beginning of 2016, I began teaching myself how to 3D model and print. This was one of my first projects: a gift to my grandparents that taught me how to create negative space and height with simple extruding.

I love this music box. It plays "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid. However, I didn't want people to only be capable of a single interaction with my box, so I added potentiometers for more affordances. This way, people had analog control over the speed and volume of the music, and they could play around with the controls as they watched the diffuse LED light flicker under the force-sensitive dolphin (which was one of the potentiometer knobs).

I love making gifts, and this one was both a lesson in the Fusion 360 spline tool as well as a birthday wall art for a friend.

In fall 2016, I took Tangible User Interfaces, a graduate course that explored the physical computing side of HCI. This GIF is of our final team project, a synesthetic musical sandbox. The goal was to not just passively listen to music, but to also tangibly feel it, change it, and produce it. We presented twice at the course's winter showcase and studied how users interacted with it, iterating in between demo days.

This box was built through lasercutting, Illustrator, Arduino, Processing, PureData Extended, and Ableton Live.

This was a solo web-scraping research project based on Instagram. My research question centered on how Instagram has transformed food from something ordinary into social media self-expression. To do so, I generated a network analysis of the community’s metadata and performed image averaging on small sets of media. Using the metadata and graphs, I wrote a research paper detailing the five recurrent themes I found in the data.

For this project, I used BeautifulSoup, Python, Java, Cytoscape, and Python Imaging Library.

This was our final team project in Bio-Inspired Design, a prototype inspired by the vasodilation and constriction of jackrabbits in the desert. Our design was of a smart jacket that would share the cooling mechanism discovered by Hill & Veghte in the 70's. We fleshed out the design digitally through Adobe Suite and physically through 3D printing and assembling a cross-section of the jacket.

We were selected to present at the Jacobs Spring Design Showcase.

At First Data's Big Data branch, I developed a location analysis product module that merged their transaction data with the US Census Data. I automated the data pulls, developed the SQL query backbone, and engineered the application UI on top of Tableau. I iterated on the user experience and performance of the product everyday with PMs and VPs.

To investigate how video journalism outlets differ on Youtube, I wrote a web scraper for channels such as VICE, BBC, Buzzfeed, and New York Times.

The final product of this project was a research paper comparing and contrasting the news topics covered and public reaction garnered across outlets.

To promote STEAM (STEM, art+design) education, I've been volunteering at the Fremont Main Library by organizing and teaching workshops. The workshop content generally focuses on exploring the creativity inherent in programming. Using friendly languages such as Snap!, I taught students of all ages how to apply recursion to generate fractals of Pokemon, design their own Mario game, and create optical illusions.

Instead of "Hello World", my first lines of code were HTML tags. My mother and aunt introduced me to Dreamweaver--yes, way back when--at the age of 7, and I made my Internet debut then with a website named "Sparklesworld". In college, I formally learned web design and begin building sites from scratch. This cat links to a previous iteration that won 2nd place at a web design showcase.

This was yet another design for a friend, one that I will now use to point to my Behance account.

This was a group project dedicated to rehauling Reddit's UI/UX. We wanted to give its home page, post page, search page a minimalistic and modern update. In our implemented mockup, we simplified their user experience with fixed sidebars, intuitive navigation, and space.

For a year, I was a Gold Tier member of Innovative Design, one of Cal's creative communities. Every week, I designed and iterated for on-campus clients. In this club, I learned and was exposed design in all its facets, from animated jQuery games to Sketch UI's.

This prototype revamped Residential Computing's landing page.