Experience Design Masters Collection

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Master's Thesis
Anxiety Monsters Data Collection & Analysis

For my Master's Thesis, I created a web application that can be used in the early stages of design research. To show off this idea I created a small cultural probe on anxiety and personal monsters.

The website initially has one prompt with two response fields;

1. What is causing your anxiety?

2. It causes me anxiety because...

Then it asks the visitor to draw that anxiety as a monster in 1 minute and either share it to the horde or destroy it.

I received over 150 monsters from up to 32 countries around the world.

All of these monsters were collected in databases then I analyzed the written themes of the monsters names as well as the different visual elements of them. The full written examination is available in the Thesis on ProQuest.

View The Website

More Explanation

AI Web Application
DJ Theremin

The DJ Theremin is a web application that uses AI to locate the body of the person using it and maps the arms to the sound that is occurring. The volume and different audio filters are activated through arms in different positions (much like a regular Theremin), the DJ Theremin also has a visual outline and representation of the audio to help the DJ understand how they are controlling the sound.

Wearable Tech Product Design
The Halo Ring (Art by: Lexie Zarow)

The Halo Ring was designed by a small team in a Design Research class. The Ring is designed to send a notification to a trusted contact when it is activated to help someone who feels uncomfortable at an interaction that they cannot escape from.

The ring was designed thanks to information gathered through surveys, competitive analysis, and interviews which were coded to find relevant recurring topics and ideas.

Designing For Behavior
Byte Size News Web App

This web application was designed to limit news consumption and refocus attention towards a positive activity. I created the application in a "Design for Behavior Class" during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself and everyone I knew attached to our devices looking for the latest news all of the time.

This application gives a short snippet of news from a wide variety of news sources all over the world. Then the only option is to learn something, be it from another language or a way to stretch, but something that requires more than just reading. Afterwards to person using the application can either learn something else or select another small snippet of a news story to view. If the news seems important there is also an option to open the story in full in another tab.

This application uses a free version of News API to gather live news and because of that there is a $500+ fee in using it in a live site, otherwise I would have created and expanded upon this idea.

P5.js Art Design

The below video is a visual art piece created using P5.js.

Prototyping Experiments
3D Printing, Laser Cutting, & More

These prototypes were created to explore different ways to rapidly create prototypes using different methods; Laser Printing, Wood Working, 3D Printing, Arduino + P5 prototyping. Not pictured is a Unity based VR prototype.