Portfolio Guide for CMU MDes
Interaction designer working with embodied systems, perception, and spatial rules
CMU Master of Design (Design for Interactions) — Fall 2026 Application
Overview
My work approaches interaction design as the construction of conditions rather than interfaces. I design participatory systems in which behavior, perception, and meaning emerge over time through rules, constraints, feedback, and embodied engagement. Rather than optimizing for efficiency or control, I am interested in how people attune to systems—how agency is shaped, negotiated, and felt through movement, timing, access, and shared space.
Across my projects, I treat interaction as a stateful process. Systems accumulate, persist, degrade, or reorganize in response to use, often without reset or resolution. I work across virtual, physical, and spatial contexts, using participation as a method to observe how individuals and groups adapt, coordinate, and construct meaning within designed conditions.
This portfolio presents text-based descriptions of selected projects to foreground system logic, interaction structure, and design process. Full visual documentation, videos, and extended writing are available via links provided for each project.
Project Index
Primary Projects
Collective Remembering — participatory system; memory & consensus
Traces — embodied sensing; accumulation & cohabitation
Threshold — spatial negotiation; sensory boundaries
Buoyant — rule-based perception; gravity & learning
Additional Projects
Bluet — spatial reading; language as structure
Treppenwitz — perceptual misalignment; inevitability
A Non-Place — accumulation; irreversibility in generic space
Collective Remembering
2018 · Participatory Installation
Tools: Unity, HTC Vive, Physical Interface
Role: Concept, system design, interaction logic, facilitation
Context
Collective Remembering investigates how memory operates when experiences cannot be revisited and must be reconstructed socially. The project is grounded in the idea that memory is non-repeatable: once an experience has passed, it can only be reconstructed, not verified. When reconstruction happens collectively, memory shifts from a private act to a negotiated process shaped by confidence, authority, and alignment.
Content
Participants first encounter a virtual environment containing a structure composed of twenty blocks. Each participant is allowed to view the structure only once. Immediately afterward, participants reconstruct the structure collaboratively using physical blocks on a gridded tabletop. A shared grid maps the virtual spatial logic into the physical space, allowing memory to be negotiated through action.
The virtual environment includes a single responsive object that provides salient feedback but has no functional relevance to the task. Many participants interpret this responsiveness as meaningful, expecting a correct solution or validation. When no answer key is provided, frustration often emerges. Over time, the reconstruction stabilizes around consensus rather than accuracy, producing a shared memory shaped by confidence and agreement.
Duration
Open-ended; the work unfolds through collective participation and stabilizes only when reconstruction activity subsides.
Process
Prototyped rules governing access, intervention, and feedback
Tested non-repeatable exposure and irreversible viewing conditions
Observed how confidence, assertion, and timing shaped collective outcomes
Iterated feedback elements to study attention without task relevance
Full documentation: [link to Collective Remembering project page]
Traces
2022 · Participatory Installation
Tools: Unity, Azure Kinect
Role: Conceptual lead, system design, interaction logic
Context
Traces reimagines the guestbook as a living ecosystem shaped by presence, duration, and proximity. Conceptually grounded in the microbiome and the holobiont, the project asks how visitors register within a site when that site is understood as a living organism composed through accumulation rather than representation.
Content
When a visitor enters the sensing zone beneath a sound dome, bodily presence is detected and translated into a persistent digital entity referred to as a Soft Cell. These entities are shaped by coarse bodily features such as posture, movement, and duration rather than identity. Each Soft Cell carries a unique sonic component.
As visitors remain in the space, they contribute additional Soft Cells. Over time, these entities accumulate, interact, and reorganize into a shared audiovisual ecosystem. The system records presence without names or messages, allowing meaning to emerge through cohabitation and sustained occupation rather than expression.
Duration
Ongoing and accumulative; the system is not reset between participants.
Process
Designed time and proximity as primary interaction variables
Iterated sensing thresholds to privilege robustness over precision
Observed how lingering, hesitation, and return visits shaped accumulation
Refined audiovisual behaviors through playtesting and spatial observation
Full documentation: [link to Traces project page]
Threshold
2022 · Interactive Spatial Installation
Tools: Light, air, scent, mechanical interaction
Role: Co-conceptualization, spatial system design, physical implementation
Context
Threshold is a site-responsive spatial system developed within a residential house located inside a redevelopment zone. Operating under conditions of impermanence, the project treats the house not as a stable interior but as a space already in transition, framing the threshold as an in-between condition to be inhabited and negotiated.
Content
The installation reconfigures the house’s original doors and windows into movable architectural fragments mounted on ceiling rails. Visitors can push, pull, and slide these elements, continuously reshaping circulation paths, sightlines, and spatial relationships. Entry is marked by an air curtain and scent that establish a sensory boundary.
Light, air, scent, wood, and glass function as structural materials rather than embellishments. Memory emerges through synesthetic adjoining, as visitors negotiate boundaries bodily rather than symbolically.
Duration
Open-ended; spatial configuration evolves continuously through visitor interaction.
Process
Iteratively tested spatial layouts using the house’s existing architecture
Adjusted resistance and placement to shape hesitation and rerouting
Tuned sensory thresholds to establish perceptual boundaries
Observed how movement and intervention reshaped spatial relations
Full documentation: [link to Threshold project page]
Buoyant — Manipulating Gravity
2018 · Interactive Virtual Environment
Tools: Unity, HTC Vive
Role: Concept, system design, interaction logic
Context
Buoyant examines how people recalibrate perception when physical rules change across space. The project asks how understanding emerges when gravity—normally treated as a constant—is distributed unevenly, and how learning unfolds through repeated spatial transitions rather than explicit instruction.
Content
The environment consists of nine translucent rooms, each governed by a distinct local gravity condition. Objects adopt the gravity of the room they occupy. Users learn system behavior by carrying or throwing objects across boundaries, where expectations formed in one space are unsettled in the next.
Crossing room boundaries triggers unique sonic responses tied to state transitions. Navigation is constrained to the ground plane, reinforcing embodied learning through timing, anticipation, and movement rather than instruction.
Duration
Open-ended; sessions unfold according to participant exploration.
Process
Prototyped local gravity as a spatial state variable
Iterated sound as feedback for state transitions
Tested navigation constraints to reinforce embodied learning
Refined interactions through repeated user observation
Full documentation: [link to Buoyant project page]
Bluet
2019 · Augmented Reality Text Object
Tools: Unity, AR Foundation, ARKit
Role: Conceptual framing, spatial translation of text, interaction design, AR implementation
Context
Bluet explores how language changes when it is no longer encountered as a linear sequence but as a spatial structure situated within physical space. The project asks how meaning shifts when reading becomes an embodied, navigational activity shaped by spatial constraints rather than by textual order.
Content
The work translates a source text by Yuzhu Chai—written across three registers (nonfiction, fiction, and an unwritten poem)—into a three-dimensional text object anchored within physical environments using plane detection. The text remains fixed in space as viewers move around it, allowing distance, elevation, and orientation to determine what becomes legible.
Different sites produce different readings. Stairs introduce elevated viewpoints, open areas allow extended navigation, and confined spaces restrict access. Meaning emerges through spatial relationships rather than progression, with reading shaped by movement, partial visibility, and repeated encounters.
Duration
Open-ended; the work supports repeated encounters across different physical sites.
Process
Collaborated with the author to translate literary structure into spatial form
Designed anchoring and navigability using AR affordances
Iteratively tested placement across varied architectural contexts
Refined spatial layouts to foreground partial access and perspective shifts
Full documentation: [link to Bluet project page]
Treppenwitz
2019 · Site-Specific Augmented Reality Installation
Tools: Unity, AR Foundation, ARKit
Role: Concept, system design, AR implementation
Context
Treppenwitz examines how perceptual orientation becomes unstable when bodily movement, architectural cues, and visual motion fall out of alignment. The project stages a condition in which perception temporarily breaks down, asking how clarity is deferred when coherence cannot be stabilized in the moment.
Content
The installation unfolds while participants descend two escalators moving in different directions. Augmented elements—window-like frames and fragments of sky—are distributed throughout the escalator environment and aligned with its architectural language.
Within these frames, motion contradicts the escalator’s steady descent, scrolling upward, sideways, or diagonally at mismatched speeds. As participants transition between escalators, misalignments intensify. Direction, scale, and orientation drift out of sync with bodily movement, producing a brief loss of spatial clarity that resolves only upon arrival at the bottom.
Duration
Fixed and irreversible; the encounter lasts only for the duration of the escalator descent.
Process
Analyzed the escalator as an enforced interaction system
Introduced controlled misalignments between visual motion and bodily movement
Iteratively tested placement, speed, and orientation of augmented elements
Tuned perceptual disruption to remain legible without overwhelming participants
Full documentation: [link to Treppenwitz project page]
A Non-Place
2018 · Interactive Virtual Environment
Tools: Unity, HTC Vive, FARO 3D Scan
Role: Concept, environment design, interaction logic
Context
A Non-Place examines how interaction and duration shape spatial meaning within environments defined primarily by function and interchangeability. Taking a classroom as its starting point, the project asks what kinds of experience emerge when a generic infrastructural space is made mutable through interaction.
Content
The environment is constructed from a three-dimensional scan of the classroom in which it was produced. When participants enter the installation, the scanned virtual environment aligns approximately with the physical room they occupy, producing a moment of familiarity that is immediately unstable.
Participants can grasp and pull at elements of the virtual space, causing fragments to detach and relocate. These changes persist. Over time, accumulated displacement erodes the coherence of the original layout. Recognition weakens, and the space becomes shaped by what has happened within it—by intervention, movement, and duration—rather than by its initial organization.
Duration
Variable and accumulative; the environment does not reset between interactions.
Process
Used volumetric scanning as both representational and structural material
Designed interaction around irreversibility and accumulation
Observed how spatial coherence degraded through repeated intervention
Refined grasping and displacement mechanics to foreground duration over navigation
Full documentation: [link to A Non-Place project page]