What happens when an aesthetic begins to obscure culture & design possibilities? — The Instagram ads you are mysteriously compelled to click on are slowly molding your style preferences. You know the ad with the perfect looking french bulldog wearing the sleek pink harness for purchase. The dog is walking toward their monochromatic-outfitted-owner standing against a bold orange studio backdrop. …

Can a user experience be too frictionless and hands-off? — In this article, I explain my thinking process behind my senior capstone called “Staredown Toolkit” for the UW Design Program.

The rise of 90s aesthetics, imperfection, and simplicity — A vibe shift is happening. The VSCO girls have skipped town. My photos remain untouched. I’m reaching for knitting needles over my iPad. We are tired of digital experiences that mock our analog world because no one likes to be mimicked. Technology isn’t always the answer to our problems.

Meme creators are just modern-day collage artists. — These 8 words drive modern-day friendships: Did you see the meme I sent you? Online communities with millions of people bond over repurposed images with new captions. The 5–10 seconds of a co-worker interpreting an image, gif, or video of a meme precedes a shared chuckle. …

How their paradoxical 90s pop music disrupts the story we tell ourselves — As I concentrate on reading labels in the Home Depot spray paint aisle, I catch myself humming along to the 90s TLC bop Waterfalls. …

How art impacts our reference points for marginalized communities — In a recent class project, I used MoMA’s collection dataset published on GitHub to create an interactive installation that reveals the dominant narratives being amplified. I break down the gender and ethnicities of the 15,222 records of artists who MoMA acquired artwork from between the years of 1930–2019. …

The perils and liberations of every day being the same. — This is not a reflection of 2020. The year where everything seemed to crash and burn leaving us with a lingering splash of disbelief and hysteria. As I write this on December 30th with two nights away from 2021, it all feels extremely anticlimactic. This is a story about cookies. …

Embracing bioregionalism in an attention economy. — Lately, I’ve been thinking about what goes into the things we care about. From my deep dives into random topics, I would enter as a skeptic and emerge from the surface with a new interest (staring into the abyss wondering why it took me this long). …

It’s still hazy on where we stand on the progression of COVID-19 cases, but the country is beginning to re-open. Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series remind us that as we begin to resume our “regular” lives we risk becoming desensitized to the whirlwind of visceral emotions engendered by the…