WRITING & GRAPHIC ESSAYS
These writing excerpts are from blog posts that explore my own personal relationship to everyday design applications. The series of posters below, envisioned as a multi-part graphic essay, explores the role of design in communities and spaces that are not profit-driven. My background in English literature and creative writing enables me to embrace design theory and experiment with the form and content of type across a variety of mediums,
"My watch has been tracking my sleep cycle and gives a little beep every morning to quantifiably show, with beautiful charts, that I’m exhausted. You slept on your stomach again, it says, your heart rate was too low, and then too high, and this line here says you should feel terrible. It can not be turned off. Have you been smoking again? Your blood oxygen was dismal last night. I find its data very enlightening, which I have to because I paid a lot of money for it."
"There is currently a sort of immutable power dynamic in any conversation with AI, where the user knows the AI has no wants or needs, and engages with a frictionless service-bot wearing a human mask. Frictionless isn’t always better — I’m wondering about the reception of an AI assistant who has wants and needs, who even asks things of the user. It might be no less helpful, and might provide more dynamic conversation. At the very least it might work to resolve our current dissonance around what to expect or hope for from our speech devices. "
"My watch has been tracking my sleep cycle and gives a little beep every morning to quantifiably show, with beautiful charts, that I’m exhausted. You slept on your stomach again, it says, your heart rate was too low, and then too high, and this line here says you should feel terrible. It can not be turned off. Have you been smoking again? Your blood oxygen was dismal last night. I find its data very enlightening, which I have to because I paid a lot of money for it."
The essay below doubled as a visualization exercise for my S2021 studio. The essay explored the role of the designer in non-capitalist spaces; graphic design is built upon a product industry. What is it's role when the designer is opposed to consumerism?
To graphically illustrate the essay, I wanted a mode which could be easily read in public spaces. I hate the notion that high level writing only be relegated to academia. These posters could easily be printed at multiple scales and wheat-pasted (though whether anyone would actually do that, I'm not sure. It's long). The form is meant to resemble physical space, with the text mapped isometrically only loose drawings of streets and buildings.
Conferences & Lectures
Showcasing Student Creativity via Holograms
Association for Creative Technologies in Academic Libraries, 2022
This lecture was the result of research conducted in 2022 with RJ Washington (reallyreallyrj.com). Holograms (or light field displays, more accurately) are one way the XR field is expanding beyond headsets, so it was important for the VR Studio at NCSU to better understand the implications of the technology. It presents important new affordances and constraints for design; are logos and signage prepared to handle focal depth if this sort of screen becomes more successful?