Chapter 1: The Liberal Arts study

During my years of study at Carleton, an esteemed Liberal Arts college in the US, where the education philosophy championed critical thinking across academic disciplines, I majored in fine arts while taking courses in computer science, social science, humanities and mathematics. The study at Carleton has cultivated me as a multi-disciplinary thinker in grasping the complexity of the world. One area of study I extensively explored, contemporary dance, has shaped my understanding conceptually as well as kinaesthetically how our body interacts with space through our presence and movement.

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Chapter 2: Computational Design

At Parsons School of Design in New York, my mentors Professor Golan Levin and Zach Liebermann encouraged me and guided me to explore the power of computation as a medium for creative expression. I extended my exploration of bodily movement into generative design and computer vision. "In Alice's world," a real-time vision based dance performance emerged from this experimentation, where one's motion is transformed into ever-evolving generative graphics, which in turn shapes the mover's intention of movement. This principle of embodied interaction, where the interface disappears but through bodily action, one interacts with digitally augmented physical space, creates an intuitive experience. As a computational designer, I focused on creating generative frameworks where participants co-create with the system in the meaning making.

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Chapter 3: Spatial Communication

As an experience designer at ART+COM Studios in Berlin for nearly a decade, I have been working on numerous projects from concept to deployment in education, culture, health, mobility, and telecommunication industries. Whether it's a museum with educational content, or an experience center for communicating brand value, each project required a pair of fresh eyes in how to choreograph visitor's journey and storytelling in space. In order to afford seamless and intuitive interaction within the digital and physical experience, a holistic approach is adopted which dictates the use of technology and design language. Sometimes a tangible object is the driver of interface while other times visitors use gestures or sounds to interact with content. Sometimes the entire space is projected to immerse visitors in a visual narrative while other times immersion takes place in the joy of using an interface that facilitates ease of navigating between overview of content subjects and deeper knowledge dive.

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Chapter 4: Design Research in Emerging Technologies

In the past six years I have been focusing on leading our cross-functional research team in creating compelling use cases in emerging technologies such as AR, VR, Wearables and Machine Learning and on the topics of Remote Presence, Multimodal Interaction and Sensing, AI assisted knowledge curation and parametric healthcare innovation. I helped establishing human-centred design process. From research, design to development, the process is highly iterative and collaborative. Each iteration begins with framing the challenge we would like to tackle, followed by building a functional prototype with appropriate fidelity, evaluating our hypothesis from user research, and finally sharing our synthesised learnings with the leadership to refine roadmap and strategies. Whether it's time to diverge or converge, I help our team stay focused on attaining the key values identified through the lens of desirability, feasibility and viability.

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The Next Chapter?

I would like to continue to craft my design leadership: to lead with purpose, empathy, and curiosity, and to cultivate camaraderie and growth mindset. I would like to be there with my team to celebrate the small wins as well as to navigate through ambiguity. I hope to continue to have the privilege of working with super talented and motivated thinkers and makers and together create real-world impact at scale.

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