California Migration Museum Tours
Migrant Footsteps is a series of free, immersive audio stories guided by audio, music, and augmented reality.
Turning a neighborhood into an immersive history experience
California Migration Museum Tours
Mobile Application
Screen shots from the Chinatown Town mobile application
The California Migration Museum (CMM) was founded in 2021 to build hands-on, immersive content that tells the rich and complex story of how migration has shaped California in profound ways – and how it continues to do so. Migration is California’s story — and CMM explores this complex history of not only welcome but also exclusion, displacement, and resistance, asking challenging questions about who “we” are — and who we want to become.
Migrant Footsteps tours spark thought-provoking conversations that can help change entrenched narratives around contemporary migration issues.
Cinema Box
I created this installation in a cafe in the Mission District that shows a video on the Columbian immigrants who came to San Francisco in the late 1950s and started the coffee roasting business that fueled the West Coasts cafe culture.
Project Goals:
Tapestry
I created this tapestry hung in a window of Old Shanghai Chinese gift shop in Chinatown. When a user points their camera at this tapestry while using the app, it triggers an augmented reality overlay thats shows what the street looked like in 1890 Chinatown.
Walking Cinema, a production company that created immersive experiences, hired me to work on a mobile application supporting an immersive tour.
The California Migration Museum (CMM) partnered with Walking Cinema to create a “virtual museum” featuring migration stories—an immersive audio-led history tour with supplemental augmented reality and video experiences triggered by location and physical objects.
Process:
I had created a mobile application from a prior project, Before the Bulldozers for the Smithsonian, which was used as a framework for the CMM application. I also made several physical artifacts to create “trigger” objects to launch short video stories or augmented reality experiences.
Team:
The Walking Cinema team comprised a Director responsible for the audio and film production, a producer who recorded and gathered stories, a mobile app developer, voice actors and historians and a junior designer who focused on the augmented graphics production.
I was the lead designer responsible for the application design, visual design, and set design for installations throughout the city.
The CMM team designed their website.
Outcome:
Four mobile apps, three immersive stories and several installations.
Migrant Footsteps is a series of free, immersive audio stories that help you discover how migration has shaped every corner of the Golden State. Walk directly into San Francisco's migration stories, guided by audio, music, and augmented reality. Migration is California's story, and Migrant Footsteps brings this history to life.
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Team leader using the cards to take attendance in Tanzania
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This last month has been the most rewarding time I have had in years. I have been delighted to be able to roll up my sleeves and pitch in to help during this crisis.
Going digital, fast.
In the Fall of 2018 I saw an opportunity that I couldn’t possibly turn down. I saw an opening for the Design Director for the City and County of San Francisco Digital Services. The fact that I already had a job was certainly a deep complication, but the opportunity to serve the city I love to lead the design team and apply what I have learned all these years in tech and design was too tempting to pass up.
The first few months were an adjustment. I had a new team who didn’t know me and who I didn’t know either. While I understand the hierarchies and politics of big companies, I didn’t know how to navigate the waters of Government from the inside. I found that the timelines were paced differently than I was used to, and while the problems we were solving were complex, they were not complex in the more experimental/pushing the envelope on technology that I was used to. I thought the biggest challenge ahead of me for 2020 was design operations, scaling the team, and evolving the existing design system. And then, the COVID-19 Pandemic happened.
The first signs things were changing were so small they were almost imperceptible. I attended a conference in Milan, Italy, and we discussed the possibility of something major happening, but still, it was in a distant, academic way. And then came the day we were told to work from home. And suddenly, everything sped up and slowed down at once.
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Zoomed out version of the seventeen foot poster
Large-scale visualization of the eBay network, including key monetization flows, identification of flows that could be optimized, and organizational and information architecture change recommendations.
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Aynne Valencia
Andrew Lynch
James Young
My role:
Design strategy
Design Research
Information Design
Visual Design
Buy Flow diagram detail
Close up of one of the sections
Legend detail
Detail of the legend describing what the symbols mean
Clients exploring the diagram
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High level strategic recommendations based on market and customer research
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Workflow documentation
Workflow diagram from the specifications documentation I created
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NOTE: Photos of users and any confidential information have been redacted.
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“Classroom” screen
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Fjord
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The Brief:
Apollo group was seeking a tablet based solution for online learning for student and teachers.
This touchpoint needed to easily port over content from their existing web platform and needed to keep the existing user interface conventions and metaphors and the architecture needed to adapt to the existing system as much as possible.
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This project was a year long engagement. My role was leading the concept and design process and transitioning work to the IOS development team. We had 6 weeks for information gathering, user interviews and identifying business rules and workflow, 6 weeks of rapid prototyping and design validation/co design sessions with users. 4 weeks of application architecture and template design, 2 weeks of visual system design and documentation and 3 weeks of design validation. We then went to development and continued to do user validation and QA.
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Web experience
JCP
e.commerce platform
R/GA 2013
Role: Design Direction
The Brief:
Develop the e.commerce strategy for the proposed rebrand of JCP.
JCP wanted to identify a new breed of customer the new brands will attract.
Approach:
This engagement included:
Identifying the new JCP customer and creating personas for this new customer
Developing an information architecture that supports the planned launch of 80+ new brands in 2013
Designing a series of experiences designed to increase conversion
The Challenge:
New brands were coming onboard but the site platform cannot handle a significant visual or navigation overhaul.
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early mock-ups
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Bank cards co-branded for Visa Go
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The Brief:
Make Visa the preferred payment method over others at the point of sale.
I was digital product design director on the team that created a series of strategic programs to make Visa the preferred payment method over cash at the point of sale.
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The example is below is one of the programs.
Research Insight:
Selecting your payment option at point-of-sale is more habit than conscious choice, making it very difficult to change. in Visa World of Change I considered how we might we turn everyday transactions into socially rewarding actions.
Visa World of Change
With every transaction, cardholders donate one penny to a cause they care about. As people around the world join in, pennies add up to big changes, giving cardholders a real reason to use Visa over cash.
Purchase Funnel: Focus on point of transaction
Channels: Targeted point of sale placements and social networks
MCC’s: Inclusive of all categories •Global: Identify charity with global appeal and tailor executions and communication channels based on countries digital lifestyle
POS Considerations: Core to the idea, advertising will focus on POP placements to drive Visa preference at the final step of the transaction
Details:
1. Visa kicks off World of Change by contributing $1 million (in line with FY09 levels) to five charities it already supports.
2. Initially, Visa partners with it’s the top issuer in each of the five markets.
3. Visa/AKQA promotes the program through PR and recruits cardholders with advertising and direct mail.
4. Cardholders join the program by registering their Visa card with the issuer and choosing a favorite cause.
5. POS signage reminds cardholders to use the card over cash and competitors. Each month the issuer adds a penny per transaction to the cardholder’s bill and forwards the total to the designated charity.
6. Issuers forward contribution data to Visa for display on the World of Change site.
7. Cardholders recruit friends through social networks and track progress online.
8. As the program grows, Visa partners with other issuers.