Ideation & Prototyping
projects
50 Shades
This project, which tasked us with creating fifty distinct iterations of a single object while maintaining its essence, was a significant challenge that pushed the boundaries of my creative thinking. I chose a common disposable lighter, initially confident in its potential. However, the primary struggle I encountered was moving beyond the object's literal, physical form and its most basic function: making fire.
My key breakthrough was defining its essence not by its shape, but by its action—any form that can contain and emit a flame.
This concept freed me to explore a universe of forms, from animals and animated characters to everyday objects, all reimagined with a functional "hole" or mechanism for ignition.
Endangered Animal art creation
The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is an extraordinarily unusual and critically endangered aquatic salamander and is found uniquely in the elaborate system of lakes and canal networks about Xochimilco in Mexico City. Unlike other amphibians, the axolotl is entirely neotenic with gills and prominent dorsal fin as a larva throughout life without metamorphosis and becoming oxypholic. Its life is solely dependent upon a spotlessly clean system of freshwater with rich aquatic vegetation, providing primary protection from predators, breeding sites for laying eggs, and a foraging ground rich with plenty of food. It is a carnivorous "sit-and-wait" predator preying on a variety of small animals including worms, insects, crustacea, and small fishes, and it is founded upon cloudy, vegetation-choked waters that it employs for ambushing food.
Tragically, the highly adapted nature of the axolotl is put severely at risk, forcing the species to the brink of extinction in the wild. It is threatened with total habitat destruction as Mexico City is becoming increasingly urban and draining and polluting its native waters with sewer and effluent runoff. Invasiveness by non-native species, particularly tilapia and perch, has been a disaster as the fishes compete with axolotls for food and, far worse, devour their young and juveniles. In addition to the pressures of overharvesting for the hobby trade and scientific research and even as a food locally, wild stocks of axolotls have taken a calamitous slide downwards. With conservation now strongly focused on rehabilitating the Xochimilco canals, restoring safe havens, and providing captive breeding programs in a desperate effort to save this legendary and science-rich species from vanishing entirely from their natural habitat.
what's Axolotl?
Sketch
creation process
My creative journey began with researching the axolotl's unique body, specifically its three defining features: the big head with external gills, four long slender limbs, and long flat tail. I wanted to find recycled materials that naturally mirrored these shapes and textures.
The most interesting piece of trash I picked was the plastic water bottle. I was surprised that a clear, modern substance like plastic would so perfectly duplicate the translucent, water-being of the axolotl. In the wild, you can sometimes see through an axolotl’s skin to its gills, and the plastic bottle captures that otherworldly, almost see-through quality. Using two bottles allowed me to create the animal’s characteristically flat, broad head shape.
For the tail and body, I used pizza boxes. It was an intentional decision because the corrugation on the cardboard makes it hard but foldable, much like the rigid, flat tail an axolotl uses for swimming. It also offers a rough, natural surface that is the complete opposite of the smooth plastic head, much like the body of the creature is juxtaposed against its gills. The limbs and gills cardboard was perfect because it cuts so nicely into small, precise shapes. I cut gills out of cardboard and stack them up in order to replicate the fluffy, feathered appearance of the actual axolotl gills.
Reflection
It was more than creating a sculpture, however; it was a lesson in seeing potential. It taught me to look at scavenged materials not for what they were, but for what they can become. It taught me that the right material can do a lot of the work for you, taking time to learn both subject and attributes of the given medium. The axolotl, for example, an animal famous for its regenerative ability, was the perfect subject you would want to attempt and translate through scavenged materials—giving new life to something once thought useless.
Flappy Bird Recreate
This product's greatest challenge was to maintain the digital mechanics of Flappy Bird into a tangible, real world game. Since the video game was designed to be simply controlled, I decided the interaction in my project should also be immediate and uncomplicated. In this project for the controllability I used a plush ball connected by a single thread and cut a gap on the top of the cardboard so the thread can be easily pulled horizontally and vertically. The difficult part of creating the interaction in the game was that I needed to precisely tune the length as well as smoothness of this horizontal gap so that the thread would freely move without catching, as the plush ball weight delivered a consistent downward push to deliver the "gravity" effect. This hands-on adjustment was essential to making the interface respond directly affecting the user's sense of control.
After I figured out how to use the thread as the “controller”, the game mechanism was solved and the only thing left for me to figure out was what the chimneys were going to be.
For the iconic chimneys, I used collected cigarette butts, taping them together into stacks of varying lengths to mimic the random height differences in the original game. This material choice was both resourceful and visually effective.
This project was a powerful lesson in interaction design, proving that a rigorously crafted physical UI—from a string control system to carefully assembled cigarette butt chimneys—could reinvent a digital classic into a uniquely compelling hands-on creation.
OHNY at Cornell Tech
Last Saturday, I participated in the OHNY at Cornell Tech campus. During the visit, I was deeply inspired by how design thinking connects with architecture, technology, and social ability. For instance, the projects named “Growing Knowledge in East Harlem” and “Fences Down Teens Up” all reveal how design can make a difference to those isolated and neglected urban areas into inclusive and educational environments. Also, “To Build a Welcoming Gateway” and the climate vulnerability assessment for Boston and Miami shows how data and sustainability design strategies can solve systemic issues like resilience, accessibility, and community's well being. These fantastic projects along with Cornell Tech’s sustainable buildings emphasized how design can serve both people and the planet.
When looking back at Papanek’s Design for the Real World, it reminds me that a good design is not just about artistic innovation but more about its responsibility and impact. It would definitely influence my future design that I would put more focus on participatory design methods to ensure that communities and people are not just subject to those art innovations but co-creators in the process. This experience at Cornell Tech reinforced my belief that ethical, inclusive, and human-centered design should be at the core of my future practice.
Time Capsule
part 1
To me the time capsule is a journey of a deep self-reflection and self-discovery. In the begining I was considering using video game characters, but soon I realzied that the essense of this project is tangibility, the memory I have to an object that I physically own. As a result I chose three objects that represent the archetypical aspects of my being: a Transformer toy from China, my adopted cat , and the varsity wrestling jacket .
Simply selecting them was the first step in a reflective journey that moved from mere sentimentalism into a deeper realization of what these things really say about my life-history. The act of weaving the narratives forced me to act as an archaeologist for my life. For every single thing, I needed to get past the "what" to arrive at the "why." I remembered the specific sound of the Transformer; the anxiety and eventual growth after adopting my cat; and the painstaking effort behind getting the latter jacket. Composing these stories-for-Instagram sharpened my skills in marrying a powerful image with an even more powerful emotional truth, channeling personal narratives into the universal language of collective memory and identity.
I feel these objects have curated into chapters of my own personal history. If not for this timecapsule project, these connecting memories would surely have been lost to time. I learned that often, our richest stories are right there in plain sight, lying silently within the very ordinary artifacts that have been bearing witness to our growth.
Transformers: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPcsf_SjGvV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Cat: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPcsxGsjM1O/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Latter Jacket: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPcs4XGjIn5/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Time Capsule
part 2
My time capsule is a personal monument that draws inspiration from the unyielding Pyramids and the transparent Louvre Pyramid. It is a vault for history, or, a then, gateway.
I used layers of cardboard to create the pyramid base to mimic the ancient structure. Meanwhile, the glass jar resembled the modern Louvre's iconic feature. The jar full of pictures holds a great memory of life: my cat, transformer toys from my childhood, and the letter jacket from high school these are the things that characterize me and are worthwhile for the future explorer to get a glimpse of my life just as we walk into the museums to comprehend the past.
I have also poured sand in the jar to represent the flow of time which slowly covers the past and our most valuable memory. But whenever you dive deep into it the memories are still there waiting for you to explore. This capsule contains my small yet significant participation in the colossal tale of time. What we preserve in the present becomes a treasure for the future.
Time Capsule
part 3
Working progress
Final Version
Reflection
The origin of the project was a very personal question: what would I want to learn if I encountered something left behind by an ancestor? That one question dictated the path of the emotional journey and story of Echo of You and because of that I decided to set the protagonist of my time capsule project as my descendant. I wanted to play with memory and all of those concepts of what gets passed down from one generation to the next — how the fragments of a former life might reveal aspects of ourselves we weren’t expecting. For the visuals I opted for a photo-realistic 3D environment to convey a stronger sense of immersion and reality. The wood grain, dust, and muted light recall the physical ritual of rummaging through a decaying memory-space. This way I could create cinematic lighting scenarios, and maintain photo-realism at the same time, making film stills and comic panels indistinguishable.
The panel progression is narratively calculated: beginning with wide establishing shots and progressively getting narrower until the reader is practically inside of the space toward the end, reverse engineering the opposite of traditional building-block storytelling. The play with perspective — stairs leading upward, doorways half-illumined — symbolically pulls the viewer closer and closer to emotional revelation. The big-scale moment of opening the timecapsule is meant to raise questions more than answers them.
I played around with digital 3D rendering and comic page doing techniques. These two different tools helped me to juggle realism and the narrative framing. Though the environment was digitally rendered, I approached the sequence like a storyboard -- considering pace, lighting and visual rhythm as more than just frozen moments.
Echo of You turned into a meditation on presence and absence — how we are formed by the echoes of those who have preceded us. In anchoring the experience around first person perspective, and in pushing the boundaries of an unusual visual style, I wanted to build not just a story to read but a moment to be in.
Digital Loneliness
