Projects

A graduate capstone project for a Strategy and Negotiation course, completed in late 2023. The concept was strong. The team dynamics were not. I'll leave it at that Every graduate program has at least one group project that teaches you more about managing people than about the actual subject matter. This was one of mine. The assignment was a strategic analysis and forward-looking recommendation for a major corporation. Our team chose IBM — a company that has spent the better

A senior capstone project that became a permanent installation at the Kendall-Frost Marsh Reserve — seven canoes fabricated from a salvaged mural, a table with a model boat, and a curatorial framework rooted in Indigenous maritime knowledge.

After my HighEcology concept was selected to move forward, I developed the final project with a partner (name redacted for privacy) for VIS 162, spring 2022. Where the solo pitch was impressionistic, this one was grounded in actual climate data for San Diego County. The stakes got more concrete — and so did the proposals. Get it? Concrete! The solo pitch started with a feeling — the texture of a future city, its bees and holograms and repurposed concrete. The final project st

Speculative design courses produce a lot of ideas that never go anywhere. That is not a failure of the form — it is the point. The value is in the generating, the articulating, the moment of writing something down and discovering whether it has enough internal logic to survive a sentence. Some of these went further than others. All of them are mine (some inspired from external sources), and here they are.

What follows is the manifesto written to accompany the typography pieces — preserved exactly as written, in full self-important glory. The typography pieces are embedded throughout. "The educated imaginator" thanks you for your time. Philosophy and science are often justifications utilized by the supposedly powerful in order to maintain their grasp over society. In 1869, when Darwin proposed the idea of “survival of the fittest,” in which organisms most adjusted to their env

Spring 2022, junior year. VIS 133A. The project was called "Bird Capitalism." I did not choose that name. On Bird Capitalism, Reductio Ad Absurdum, and the Virtue of the Grey There is a particular kind of academic frustration that comes not from a hard problem but from a constrained one — where the intellectual territory is genuinely interesting and the framing keeps pulling you back toward the obvious. That was the experience of this project, start to finish, and also, event

History, as it is typically rendered — in textbooks, in museums, in the kinds of educational experiences that pass for immersion — is almost always one-sided. The winners write it. The losers' versions survive, if they survive at all, in oral traditions, in suppressed texts, in the stubborn persistence of mythology that refuses to be entirely rationalized away. MyRth's proposition was that VR and AR technology, combined with AI trained on the full range of surviving accounts.

A speculative design concept pitched in spring 2022 for VIS 161 — a class dedicated to imagining things that don't exist yet. This one didn't keep me up at night, which is ironic. The premise started simply enough: what if you didn't have to waste your sleep? Not in the grim productivity-hack sense — not a supplement stack or a sleep tracker or another optimization protocol for the already over-optimized. Something stranger and more interesting than that. The concept was this

The solo concept pitch I developed for VIS 162 — a speculative futures and sustainability course — during my junior year, spring 2022. My idea was selected to move forward into a team final project, which became its own iteration. This is where it started -- and honestly, I think the idea has real viability. An overwhelming feeling of closeness. Everywhere I walk, it permeates, oozing saturated colors and blue screens amidst an occasional chirp from a passerby. The air feels

The second of three speculative design concepts from VIS 161, spring 2022. The term "synthetic sensing" is mine. The ideas came first; the rationale followed, as it often does. The premise was straightforward enough to sketch in a few sentences, which is usually a sign that the idea is either very simple or very large. This one turned out to be the latter. Synthetic sensing, as I conceived it, is the use of AR and VR technology to extend human perception beyond its current ph

In spring 2022, during my junior year, I joined a standalone innovation sprint program that partnered student teams with the San Diego Zoo. We got free zoo access for the entire quarter — which was, honestly, reason enough. This is the project I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did. Seven Feeders for a Langur (An Innovation Sprint at the San Diego Zoo) I am, by training, a business and design student. I think in systems and aesthetics, in stakeholder value and visual hiera