Portfolio

Overview

The 2040 Master Plan Game is an innovative crowdsourcing platform aimed at engaging community members, engineers, architects, and local government officials in the redesign of infrastructure in climate-vulnerable areas. My role as a visual designer involved creating graphics and layouts that enhanced usability and fostered collaboration among diverse stakeholders, ultimately aiming to build resilient communities.

Problem

The project addresses the increasingly negative effects of climate change and encourages a collective re-imagination of built environments with respect to resilience, community needs, and environmental impact. It addresses the systemic nature of responding to climate change, incorporating social, technolgical, environmental, economic, and political challenges into the final product.

Solution

Recommendations for the client included elevating and prioritizing community voices and needs, leveraging engineering knowledge of innovative materials, and collaborating effectively with all stakeholders.

Goals

The primary motivation behind this project was to facilitate an inclusive and effective platform for community input, ensuring that diverse voices contribute to urban planning discussions.

Impact

Created along with teammates Nicci Obert and Carlo Lopa, this collaborative design project asks the participant to suspend disbelief and engage in a simulation experience in the year 2040. Imagine a world in which architects, engineers, politicians and community members come together in one space to achieve desired results for a planned community. This project was developed as a suggetsive prototype for our client, Autodesk, as part of a competitive academic setting. Our team was nominated for the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) Student Award, and won first place in the 2024 Masters Group Project category.

2040: The Future of Preventative Health is a comprehensive foresight report that is the culmination of research and analysis from three courses I have taken throughout the Foresight Program, including Futures Research, Systems Thinking, and Proseminar in Foresight. This report explores how the client, Austin-Travis County, can prepare for futures that consider the integration of a regenerative food system with a preventative healthcare system in ways that are both accessible and affordable for all community members. This topic is a passion of mine and I believe it is increasingly important to consider futures of health as a foresight practitioner. Click through the project to view the entire report.

The purpose is to enrich the understanding of a narrative through several key milestone iterations over the course of a semester. In restorying, I have learned to critically examine cultural fixedness and how to disrupt the emplotted narrative of the present and future. Technological and scientific innovation directly impact culture, and indirectly impact policy. Restorying is both an art and a science. We can look at the same story 50 times and see 50 different versions of it. In this project, I learned the value of patience, reflection, repetition, and refinement as each iteration provided valuable insight into how the story would change.

The key milestone iterations depicted in the diagram take us through the chosen story, an article from the New York Times titled “It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction,” where at each step the story is altered in a way that reimagines the story. The process involves a systematic evaluation of each element of a story, from the plot, to the characters, to the timeline. From there, we can explore the imagined implications and extend the story even further into the future, rewriting the final narrative for an alternative impact.