Insights
Insights is an interactive card game I created for my final year thesis. I wanted to solve the problem of education and media bias in a human approach and through entertainment. I developed the game from beginning to end, including the questions. I spoke to people from every region of the world, asking them what they wished the rest of us knew about their country and culture, which is how I came up with the questions. I also created chance cards to animate the game.
Initially, I had no plans to commercialize the game, which is why I took the patterns from online, as I knew they weren't going to be published anywhere. However, my professor adored the idea and pushed me to consider commercializing it. I started working on patterns for each region. Below, you can see the patterns for Africa and the Middle East & North Africa. The African pattern to the left seemed too traditional, so I decided to give it a modern twist by using different colors that pop more!
North America and Europe were the most challenging to develop, as both regions cary very different cultures and history and it seems to go against the whole concept of my game to generalize and put them all in the same box. This is why I decided to keep a set of colors assigned to each region, but develop different patterns that could convey the essence of every country and culture. Below, you can see a variation of the Middle East & North Africa cards.
The Fourth Estate
The Fourth Estate was a school project that aimed to target two major pain points in the media industry in regards to the news: the absence of reporting on certain non-Western countries as well as the millennial generation's declining trust in all forms of media.
I developed the concept of a mobile application that features one underreported country a week, chosen based on an event, an outburst or any type of news that makes it relevant. It uses local journalists to convey the story of that country through the use of Virtual Reality (VR). Every day of the week would cover a different topic/industry. The goal is also to educate the west about regions it rarely hears about, and nurture their knowledge and curiosity.
NIKE Project
The sports apparel brand Nike approached our class at Parsons and presented their need to include sustainability and make it a more important part of their brand.
Each group had the freedom of tackling any aspect of the industry they wanted - from R&D, to the Supply Chain to creating pop-up experiences, which is what our group did. Our research unveiled the increasing purchasing power women have today and the increasing part they play in regards to sustainability. We therefore curated a pop-up experience in the shape of a geodesic dome inspired by Buckminster Fuller, as it offers a more durable, stronger and bigger space solution. We wanted to educate our audience as well as immerse them, which is why we introduced them to certain sustainable materials and give them the chance to use them to design their own clothing on a giant tactile screen. For the less creative minds, we also offered of ready-made sports apparel clothing options.
