Collective Digital Care

This program uses shuffle() and array.push() to create an iterative pattern of randomly generated rectangles and ellipses filled with randomly chosen colors from a set palette. Ultimately, a randomized collage of basic shapes are drawn onto the canvas.

This program includes user interaction using mouseClicked(). The program starts with an empty background and two "buttons" made of ellipse patterns. If the user clicks on either button, a new, randomized sketch will be displayed on the canvas in whatever color scheme the button represents. If the same button is pressed multiple times in a row, the color scheme will not change, but a new pattern will still be displayed.

A collective drawing tool to visualize constellations and see what others are seeing.

chakrasynth is an interactive digital sound healing interface. touch the screen to play a healing note associated with the current chakra. take some time to focus within yourself and breathe deeply along with the circle in the middle. use the affirmations that appear when you click and drag to draw across the page. you can feel the presence of others in the room through the hearts that appear as users visit and interact with the page. reload to target a different chakra.

This iterative design is inspired by "I COULD BE SOMEONE" (2020) by Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor, Jeffrey Gibson. 

Playing around with Glitch and socket.io to create a multiplayer experience. Help Remy plate the ratatouille with others! 

This project is my first attempt at merging my UI/UX skills with my developing web design ones. I chose a mobile app prototype I had created in Figma, and gave myself the challenge of recreating its style and interactivity for the web. KidsPost itself is a publication run by Washington Post, presenting a variety of articles, quizzes, and contests directed towards younger audiences. It’s design exactly mimics that of the Washington Post, so I wanted to redesign the interface so it is more child-friendly.

**Disclaimer: this webpage isn't fully responsive yet, but that is the next goal :)

When thinking about collective digital care, I thought about the collective drawings we would do at the start of class on the Zoom whiteboard. There was never any prompt yet a scene would slowly take shape and I always found it really calming to sit and draw as a group. So I wanted to combine this concept with a nudge of reflection for the drawers.

My drawing tool is called "✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: casual magic :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧" and it explores romanticizing life's everyday casual moments. A prompt is generated that asks the user to reflect on something small that happened during the day and just draw based on it. The prompts are purposefully specific about the present and hopefully it reminds the drawer to remember this little things that make life magical!

One of my first p5.js exercises! Practicing nested for loops, arrays, and interactive mouseX/mouseY variables.

'stay with me' is a zoo live cam roulette project that was imagined out of Canada's third round (April 2021) of stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19.
           
in an intensely virtual and remote time, I felt incredibly apathetic and jaded, but when stumbling across wildlife and zoo live cams, I found a deep sense of comfort. it was a reminder of being a part of something bigger than just an individual, that there was still parts of this beautiful ecosystem that carried on.

i included live cams from all around the world so you can come across sleeping polar bears in the USA, while the elephants in Australia are waking. 

Keep this tab open when you're doing work or studying and you'll always have some company :-)

For Searching The Clouds I was inspired to look more closely at my own relationship with technology. I will admit, there are flaws and dependencies in the way I use the internet and create my presence online, but in the spirit of the poem, I decided to give this project a more positive twist. I went back through my overflowing screenshots folder and collected 9 of my favorite screenshots. They each remind me of who I was at different points in time, who I was friends with and how we have all changed till now, and in general, they helped me relish in some good ol' nostalgia. This project is (hopefully!) a warm celebration of the way technology can bring people together. I used HTML5, CSS, AND jQuery to complete this project.

The way I interpreted the poem by Richard Brautigan was "how does a more habitable digital world look like?" My response to this question was based in the pandemic and lockdown where I was experiencing an increasingly unhealthy relationship with technology (specifically my screen time). There were three main elements to this garden, the first being the screenshots of my text messages with friends, the "im feeling" button, and Lauv's song "Modern Loneliness."

For the screenshots, I went throught my messages and searched for words such as "miss", "facetime", "call", etc. I noticed that much of the time it was my friends reaching out to me rather than the other way around and even though I miss them very much as well, it is difficult for me to text and call because I just prefer in-person conversation. This is the great paradox of me and this generation because we have access to technology that keeps us all connected easier, yet I still feel lonley. The messages are layered and as the viewer clicks through them, they strip away till the last message which is me quoting Lauv's song: "I love my friends to death but I never call and I never text." This line just captures my relationship with technology and the emotions I feel towards my friends. As the viewer clicks the last text, the rest repopulate.

For the "im feeling" button, I took all the most recent emojis I used in my phone created an overlay. Once this button is clicked, the viewer is unable to interact with any other part of the site. It acts as a way to confront and work through one's emotions, no matter how overwhelming, and to just sit and pause. I was surprised as to how much my emojis actually reflected what I was feeling.

Modern Loneliness by Lauv "I've been thinkin' 'bout my father lately The person that he made me The person I've become And I've been tryna fill all of this empty But, fuck, I'm still so empty And I could use some love And I've been trying to find a reason to get up Been trying to find a reason for this stuff In my bedroom and my closet The baggage in my heart is still so dark Modern loneliness, we're never alone But always depressed, yeah Love my friends to death But I never call and I never text, yeah La di da di da You get what you give and give what you get, so Modern loneliness, we love to get high But we don't know how to come down"

This program allows digital sketches made in grayscale. In order to draw, set your initial starting point by clicking anywhere on the canvas. To begin sketching, hold down on any of the arrow keys. Using different key options, you can decrease or increase the stroke ("1" and "2"), change the grayscale tone ("a"), clear the sketch ("c").

The objective is to sketch without "lifting your pen off the paper." Though you can make style options using the keys listed above, the challenge is to create a dynamic sketch without resetting your starting point or erasing mid sketch. Mistakes are just added details :)

Kelp holds immense significance for communities globally, as an important source of food, material, and protection amongst other things. Metaphorically, kelp is also symbolic of the unconscious or the deeper aspects of the self. This site invites you to dig into that deeper part of yourself, into the unconscious, to find grounding and freedom between the branches.

Here is the p5.js sketch I made for the Iterative Pattern exercise.

My Cybernetic Garden, inspired by SZA's "CTRL" album

GIF image of SZA surrounded by old computers in a field of grass. A search engine is on the top of the screen, allowing for users to search for her music and show the videos.

Using P5.js, I was able to create a collaborative experience for users to color in the album artwork for Tyler, the Creator's album "Flower Boy."

Using P5.js, I was able to create a face filer that resembles Aang's arrow tattoo from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Using classes and objects in p5.js, I was able to create an array of bees that buzz around the screen.

Inspired by the imagery of deers in a field with flowers and computers, I imagine how technology might have to change or be used differently to be harmonic with our natural way of life; where we have our own autonomy. Technology allows us to gain access to information, get things done faster, and push away the things we don’t like. When thinking of a garden, I imagine a place that is simple, abundant, and slow. I was inspired by the words of the poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan, particularly the line, “I like to think.” So much of technology is about us not having to think, or think deeply. I wanted to imagine a cybernetic garden as a playground, and as a place to observe, be bored, slow down, and be with ourselves.

I typed "flower" into my camera roll and this is what came up. Using p5.js I created an interactive garden to document the ephemeral moments in my life and create a digital environment to connect back with nature. I wanted to find harmony and balance with technology over the years and piece together a network of my relationship with tech. 

An aquatic iterative pattern design resembling mermaid scales, created using p5.js and an ellipse function. 

A pattern using nested for loops and an added function. My inspiration for this pattern was the works of Sol LeWitt and his vibrant and snake-like patterns. I also was inspired by the dragon dance and wanted to emulate that type of movement, color scheme, and geometry. 

An interactive online bedtime storybook, created using p5.js. It's a metaphorical story about mind vs matter, and being in a form incongruent with who you are inside. It’s about the differences between the visual world and emotions, thoughts, stories, and abstract things that create who you actually are. This is a display of the opening page with various characters that each have something to say when clicked on. 

A drawing tool focused on care through language and communication. When we communicate online it's hard to understand body language, words can be misunderstood, and things left unsaid. I wanted to focus on creating this individualized space for care, with this canvas as an expression of the mind: excessive, jumbled, vibrant, and loud.

I typed "flower" into my camera roll and this is what came up. Using p5.js I created an interactive garden to document the ephemeral moments in my life and create a digital environment to connect back with nature. I wanted to find harmony and balance with technology over the years and piece together a network of my relationship with tech. 

Exploring p5.js and Pose net with No Face or Kaonashi from Spirited Away (▰˘◡˘▰)

A web based drawing tool that you use with your nose! Select your color, then hold down space and move your nose to draw. Mode with love in p5.js :)

This ASL fingerspelling detector uses a neural network to estimate the pose of the hand, then feeds that data into another neural network to classify the pose as a letter of the alphabet! This is the first web-based ASL classifier to use pose estimation instead of pixel based learning, making it more applicable to different skin tones and lighting conditions.

A simple particle generator creating music notes that radiate out from the center of the screen

This web-based experience lets you draw on your friends' faces! People logged on simultaneously will share a filter for everyone to draw on, and it will be tracked to each individual face.

A meditation on the apparent dichotomy between digital and physical mediums. 35 Polaroids were digitized and clickable with several reflective sentences hidden in the site.

After reading the piece analyzing the poem “All
Watched Over by the Grace of Loving Machine” through
the lens of 2020, I thought about my relationship
with technology and social media in the media
activism/ cancel culture era. I am of the belief that
social media can cultivate good mental health so long
as it is used in the correct capacity. An example is
screenshotting quotes on Pinterest. This activity can
help people rationalize their anxiety about the
future or get out of depressive moods. In my project,
I went through my images and my text messages with
loved ones and pulled some images that display media
usage that bolsters one another. The selected media
varied from memes to quotes by Morgan Harper Nichols
to text messages in my family group chat. Each image
is situated around the window space in the website,
however, this orientation will likely change as
JQuery is added to the website.

In the foreground of the piece, I included my own
laptop. I felt like this would personalize the site
and cement the images into my own experience in the
digital world. The laptop is centered in a graphic of
grass, tying the entire website to the nature-focused
aspect of the aforementioned poem. I think that the
relation to nature is important because if we want
our relationship with the digital world to change, we
need to evaluate it from a humanized perspective.
There is a human on the receiving end of a comment,
regardless if a comment deserves critique or not. I
read somewhere that we can’t control everything that
happens to us or around us but we can choose how we
react to those things. We can choose how we respond
to technology, and make boundaries with it just like
we do with our friends and peers.

This website is an interactive page aiming to
rewrite the understanding of ever-increasing
chronic illnesses. Since these conditions
and diseases last either for a significant period
of time or for an entire life, they have
significant impacts on those who receive a
diagnosis. Yet, since these illnesses impact almost
all aspects of a person’s lifestyle there is little
medical research is done on a more subjective side
effects of these conditions. Hence, it is important
for patients to share their experiences so that
they do not feel isolated in their human experience
and so that they feel as if they can reach the help
to improve health in whichever way they can.
Healing has a lot to do with mindset and it is time
the medical dialogue embraces it.

Ever felt like you need to commiserate when grappling
with your mental health, or grappling with the
world’s dark truths? This website takes the position
that sometimes we have to get real and gritty to feel
better about where our heads are at, and cope with
the disappointing -yet real- aspects of the human
experience. The bottom line is that whatever you are
feeling at your core, you are not alone, and you
should not feel like you are. Ever. Please remember,
that, while this site is a satire, there is a
delicate balance between sarcasm and insult. Please
take care to remain on sarcasm's side of the balance.