Truly one of the most memorable and enlightening experiences of my life. Italian history, design history, in-field ethnography studies, design charettes, trancendent moments, interviews with legendary designers, presentations, photos, a website, and research papers was all the things I went through during this field school. One of the highlights of what I accomplished was being the primary writer for a 30+ page paper analyzing China and Italy's relationship in terms of design.

While a house can be energy efficient, energy conservation is very much dependent on the residence of the home. Through the use of interviews, scenarios, journey frameworks and design charettes, I contributed in the development of interfaces that would help to encourage and reward good energy use habits in their home. Furthermore, we wanted to move away from the idea of maintanence and more towards a tending garden metaphor in managing home energy use.

Leading a team of 6 with a mix of people from both design and business background, we developed a attractive collectible type product with the goal to create awareness about sustainability and social responsibility themes. The process demostrates my ability to instruct and lead even non-designers in utilizing unique research and conceptualization methods, which created the foundation of our sucessful product.

Research In Motion's documentation team needed to build a webportal to replace the temporary one that was in use. As interaction designer, I iterated wireframes, documentation and information architectures to ensure the needs of the docs team was met and that the designs were feasible for the developers. While creating the designs and consulting with both sides, I applied my knowledge of good design, good usability, and compatibility with RIM's existing brand.

The founders of this start-up company was about to release their first product. I was asked to consult them in creating this animation that would help to communicate the products potential benefits to a company even to a non-technical audience. Upon grasping an understanding of the product myself, I storyboarded the animation that would utilize clean and clear vector graphics to walk the viewer through a scenario and the capabilities of the product.

A request came out to create personas for over 15 pre-identified corhorts that used RIM's various products. Since I could not possibly consult in the creation and management of all 15 personas, I had to develop a systemic process. This included a template for the persona, data gathering methods, usage of the persona and how/when to revise them.

Our team created an augmented reality game that required the solving of puzzles in order to escape from a room. We used precedence from existing virtual puzzle games as well as utilized our design background to create, clues, affordances, and interactive components that added to the enjoyment of the game.

Creating a titling sequence was delicate work as it needs to show an understanding of the films narrative, themes and feel while not revealing too much of the movie for those who haven't seen it. Our team did extensive analysis into all aspects of the film to storyboard, film and composite a title sequence for this classic Kurosawa picture.