Check out the weird stuff I've made.

That's a classmate who had never seen a naginata before, let loose with one in the lab while the sketch painted along behind them!

What is naginata?

A naginata is a Japanese glaive: a curved blade on the end of a long shaft. The modern martial art built around it is called atarashii naginata, and it's the one I practice!

What makes it different from most Japanese martial arts is reach. A naginata is taller than you are. So the whole art is built around sweeping circular movement, switching which end is forward, and controlling a very long lever. It's also the only one of these arts where sune, the shin, is a legal target. That tells you how low and how wide the movement goes.

Big, fast, curved paths carved through the air. I really wanted to see the shape of that.

	![A single practitioner in keikogi and haka

A semester of exercises for Seeing Machines at ITP, a class teaching various techniques and solutions for tracking and sensing people or objects in space, all written in C++ with OpenFrameworks pre gen-AI. I studied computer science and have spent my career on the web, so dropping into C++ and a creative coding framework meant relearning a lot of things I thought I knew.

These are in the order I built them, which is also roughly the order of how much they could see.

Experiment #1: Karina's Game of Life

First, let's talk about Conway's Game of Life!

It's a cellular automaton that mathematician John Conway came up with in 1970. It's also a zero-player game. You set up a grid of cells, hit go, and then never touch it again.

The whole ruleset is four lines:

1. A live cell with fewer than 2 live neighbors dies, as if from loneliness
2. A live cell with 2

The prompt

A product for a hotel that is inspired by the absurdity of Kenji Kawakami's chindōgu and the craftsmanship and aesthetic of Kenya Hara (creator of MUJI).

If you need a refresher on what a chindōgu is, I went deep on it during my Floordozer project for this same class: an "unusual tool" that solves an every day problem most can relate to but often creates more problems while doing so.

As for the aesthetic, MUJI started in 1980, and their full name, Mujirushi Ryōhin, means something like "no-brand quality goods". Kenya Hara has been their art director since 2001. He describes the whole philosophy as emptiness: objects that don't shout at you, that stay quiet enough for you to project whatever you want onto them.

Brainstorming

Vera and I went through a lot of ideas including:

• A cargo bathrobe that holds all the things a hotel gives you: door key, toi

What is a Chindogu?

A Chindogu is an "unusual tool" that solves an every day problem most can relate to but often creates more problems while doing so. Kenji Kawakami coined the term in Japan in the '80s and '90s and created a skymall style magazine of user submitted chindogu.

![A photograph of a woman asleep in a train with a helmet and suction cup stuck to the win

The prompt

This project was for my grad school class Designing the Absurd, the same class that I later made the Floordozer and the Ice Bucket Diffuser for.

The prompt: to make a chindogu phone add-on. That is, device that is powered by the port on your phone and solves a problem, perhaps poorly or by creating more problems. If you need a refresher on what a chindōgu is, I went deep on it during my Floordozer project for this same class: an "unusual tool" that solves an every day problem most can relate to but often creates more problems while doing so.

I partnered with my friend Elif on this one, our idea: a device that plugs into your phone's USB-C port to power a lipstick applicator.

I mean, who hasn't been in a rush somewhere and needed help with their makeup on the way?

Finding the form

Prototyping with what was around

First we wanted to figure out the best form factor. We were thinking harmonica holder, helmet, or phone case.

We prototyped with things

For Designing Spaces & Environments Using AI, we were to research and explore ideas of what to build in space, taking inspiration from the NASA's Artemis mission.

Muse is a place for people to be inspired by and honor the majesty of space, the moon, and all the accomplishments of the pioneers that got us to the moon. It seconds as a small reminder of home and our humanity. The exterior of this space is intended to be a monument built from lunarcrete that blends into the scenery around it, like a less personified and more universally culturally appealing Mount Rushmore.

Inside is intended to be a museum and botanic garden, climate and air controlled with a variety of plants carefully selected for survivability on the moon. Along the paths of the botanic garden will be relics of “firsts”; the first lunar rover, the first golf ball shot on the moon, and so on, for visitors to admire.

Blending into the moon itself, the Muse building will go a few floors deeper than first appears. Excavate to cr

Let’s get personal for a hot second here.

In 2020, I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The diagnosis came after 13 years of therapy and 4 other diagnoses. I’ve experienced just under a dozen different types of therapies, and I’ve written quite a few articles on mental health and therapy since my diagnosis.

I decided to creatively explore how one can express the feelings of both a manic high and a depressive low!

Concept

In theater, there’s the common happy/sad, comedy/tragedy Dionysus masks. I thought that would be a good analogy for what I wanted to portray.

In trauma therapy, there’s not only the concepts of mania and depression, but there’s also the concept of hyperarousal and hypoarousal in trauma states. This is called The Window of Tolerance.

In the Window of Tolerance model, people go from high energy anxiety (hyperarousal) to low energy lethargy (hypoarousal). The ideal is to stay in the “window of tolerance” inbetween.

I also have complex PTSD, so I’m intimately familiar with this model as well as manic depression.

People with rapid cycling bipolar disorder or suffering from extreme trauma state switching have a narrow band for their Window of Tolerance. They also have a proble

Experiment #1: Button Swatch

Materials

• Square of blue felt
• 3V button battery
• Conductive thread
• 3mm LED, Magenta, Transparent DC 2V – 3.2V 20mA

Interaction

You place a 3V button battery plus-side down onto the circle with a plus sewn into it and fold the corner with the ground symbol to the back side to watch the LED light up!

Possible Futures

Really cool idea for connecting circuits via folding with textiles. Also, didn’t think of ever using a button battery, and that’s way more convenient for wearables.

Experiment #2: Heart Pressure Button

![Ironing on conductive fabric on either side of the heart fabric. Gotta be careful ironing on polyester!](/optimized/portfolio/textile-interfaces/hea

In the class Learning the World, One Thing at a Time, taught by Lydia Jessup, we learned about the Implosion research method to deeply analyze and research an object we encounter in every day life across the following dimensions: Labor, Professional, Material, Technological, Context, Political, Economic, Textual, Historical, Particle, Educational, Mythological, and Symbolic.

If you're interested in learning more about the method itself, I wrote an article about it here:

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Really, the Implosion Method implores us to ask two questions about our chosen object:

1. How does the object exist in the world?
2. How does the world exist within the object?

Research

We had one week to choose an object and study it across 2+ dimensions and use 2+ different research sources, such as archives, interviews, or surveys.

I chose a Zenith TV remote I found on a junk shelf for my chosen object. I studied Human-Computer Interaction and am always excited to learn more about interaction devices, so it seemed like a perfect fit! I als

Context

As a 90s kid, I grew up a huge fan of Batman: The Animated Series and Harley Quinn was always one of my favorite characters. 2022 marked Harley Quinn's 30th birthday of her inception as a character for the show, so what better way to celebrate than to dress up as her for New York Comic Con?

![Illustration of a harlequin dressed woman

Context

In 2019, Atlus announced they were doing a re-release of their famous game Persona 5, but with new content. The top thing they announced was that the new version, dubbed Persona 5 Royal, would have a brand new character who is a badass ballerina. I knew I had to be this character for Halloween, just in time for its October 31, 2019 release date!

The Process

Making the jacket

First thing to do was to make a jacket pattern. The concept art was a good enough reference for the front of the jacket, but none of the official art showed the back of the jacket. I combed through the trailer for the game to find a shot of it.

Using m

My close friend from high school and I starting to learn how to ski and snowboard together. After he decided he was going to snowboard every winter season, he commissioned me to make a custom snowboard design.

He is a huge fan of both Star Wars and The Legend of Zelda, so his only request was to make some sort of mashup of both with some Japanese motifs. Given that I'm a huge Zelda fan, a budding Star Wars fan, and a Japanophile, I was teeming with ideas.

First Draft

My friend loves The Great Wave Off Kanagawa and has that print in many forms around his house. My first ideas revolved around incorporating that into the design.

There's a Zelda game that takes place on islands in a great ocean, so this was the first idea:

My friend liked the idea but he really wanted the style to be more based on one of the more recent Zelda games at the time, Skyward Sword. The art style in that game is inspired by impressionistic paintings, and he wanted a similar aesthetic to be used on his board for both the Zelda and Star Wars motifs.

Design iterations

Skyward Sword has no oceans, and Stars Wars has few, so I threw out the waves in favor for Mt. Fuji. I decided a more action-packed scene of Li