A glowy green rat residing in your browser which tells the truth about you. This is a Chrome extension prototype that is not yet published. When the icon is clicked, a button saying “Squeaky squeak!” appears. The button will make the rat appear, and the rat will quiver for a few seconds. Then below the rat, the user will see a rat telling them what are the top three sites that they have visited along with the how many times they visited the sites based on the browser history.

The rat is a medium that reveals that on the backside of the browser, the data has been collected. It also puts a concept to the test that users' ultimate wishes are being productive and being entertained by the little virtual friend. This prototype combines the pet and productivity extensions to see how people react to the fact that they are compromising their privacy to achieve something they think they want such as productivity and cuteness.

Scruffy is a robot toy for personal use with a form of a dog. The goal is to encourage users to contemplate on interpersonal and human-object interactions and emotional expressions by playing with it. The design aims to provide unexpected and negative interactions for users. From the default aggressive reaction of Scruffy, people have a chance to think about their actions and consequences. Users need to spend enough time to understand a complex object with patience to finding out Scruffy's unknown features without given instructions. The toy has multiple states and expressions that will function as emotional representations.

The research started by exploring topics including harassment, social robots, cuteness, and animal memes for emotional expressions. Recently, Scruffy 1.0 has gone back to nature. Scruffy 2.0 might come back later.

TO THE POLLS! is a board game designed for educational purposes. The goal is to encourage people to learn and think about the existing barriers and issues with the remote voting system in the United States.

Users will be given a mission to successfully collect as many votes as possible by playing the game. Players need to make strategic decisions to win. The game is inspired by Monopoly. To play, participants throw a dice and then earn a random card that contains information on chances or risks. Every corner of the map represents three main obstacles to the current remote voting system. When a user successfully comes back to the starting point (one round), it will count as one ballot collected. If everyone is in, the team wins. The game presumes that every players will collaborate to achieve a common goal, however, a disruptive strategy is also possible by utilizing the cards. There is a limited number of turns, and this aspect raises a stake and requires a strategy. There is an additional spinning wheel that will offer a few lucky chances to help or exclude other users.

*This project was co-developed with Mayuri Mei Lin.

Hight Potter explores a gray area of Intellectual Property law. The book is a remix of two chapters and raises a question regarding the smallest language unit to judge copyright infringement in literature in English. If a machine divides a novel into words and randomly rearranges them to create a new book, (Markov chain, p5.js RiTa library) is it infringing copyrights? What is the minimal unit to be considered as copyrighted contents?

* The original text is from Harry Potter (Book 1, Chapter 1 & Book 3, Chapter 2) because… [See here]

Babel is a short 3D animated film featuring individual unique motions. Each participant described the same word, “world” with their bodies. The project started with the idea of imagining body movement as a language, which is partly based on my experience as a foreigner and an interest in the universality of language. More than 10 people voluntarily contributed by submitting videos of their movements.

Due to the pandemic and also for the efficiency in making, the AI-powered motion capture tool Radical was used for motion capture. Other tools used for this film are Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Maya, MotionBuilder, Adobe AfterEffect, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premiere.