Academic Research Interests
In my free time, I have a passion for design research that extends beyond my professional responsibilities and into the realm of Design Academia. I enjoy exploring emerging speculative design trends, studying new ways to teach students “soft data” visualization, and delving into design can help us navigate the narratives we tell ourselves and how to fill the holes marked by change.
1. Data visualization: Making data Portraits with Soft Data
I’ve always been interested in the designer’s role in “Soft Data” within the context of data visualization; the humanness behind the numbers, and the more personal and intimate data sets that aren’t seen as traditionally empirical. What we are missing in data gathering today is the narrative data sets that are prompted by more thoughtful questions such as, “What keeps you up at night?” or “What are you searching for in this life?”. Elements in this Soft Data category (i.e. opinions, experiences, and stories) can provide rich context to narratives that the hard data may leave out, and help us to understand complex cultural phenomena that cannot be measured in traditional data-gathering questions.
Hard data only gets us so far; we need the soft data to detail experiences, interactions, environments, values, and feelings. With soft data visualization, we can gain deep insights and understandings of complicated issues in cultural and social realms, and make connections that may often be overlooked. An ever-changing social landscape necessitates more thoughtful ways to capture data portraits that have depth and open up new worlds of information. I aim to use soft data and design as tools to address & research social phenomena and create data visualization research methods that are easy to reproduce.
2. Speculative Design as a method to improve Higher Education
Speculative Design is an incredible lens one can use to create new pedagogies, strategies, and approaches for higher education in design. The role of design higher education is changing, and there are countless opportunities to help redesign its processes and dynamics. What better lens to use than the one that Speculative Design provides: opening up the realm of fictional worlds and encouraging students’ imaginations by exploring the unreal (which I define as “theoretical, hypothetical, or fictitious realities”) as a method of improving project outcomes.
Getting students to a place where they are fluent in Adobe is a first & necessary step, but the next step is asking: how do we switch from designing for the probable to designing for the plausible or possible? This is not an act of trying to make a simple prediction but an act of opening up new worlds and methods in design pedagogy. Looking ahead, I plan to use Speculative Design to construct alternative project concepts & lesson structures to present to students, allowing them to create more innovative solutions for real-world problems. If we, as designers, are designing for the present, then we are too late.
3. Change & Renewal: Design as a tool for navigating changing narratives & identities
My fascination with the concept of change, flux, and renewal began in my graduate school years while I researched the work of Keller Easterling and discovered Kiesler’s “Endless House.” This interest further developed during COVID-19 and has continued in the years since, as I worked to rebuild my life after loss and learned to navigate my “new” life. Researching change helps us understand the dynamics of adaptation, growth, and renewal in various contexts: How do we study something that has no true beginning and end? Why are there stories from over 100 years ago that suddenly seem very familiar?
Change is one of the few things that are always constant & always filled with contradictions; it is an opportunity for renewal, it is disruption, it is resistance, it is grief, and it’s the conflict of knowing that beginnings and the endings are two sides of the same coin. Change leaves a hole, and the desire to fill that hole is fundamental. Through a mixed-methods approach, I believe this is where design can help us navigate the narratives we tell ourselves and how to fill the holes marked by change. I imagine that the form of these research findings will depend highly on the content gathered.