Research: Systems of Agency
A sustained line of inquiry into immersive heritage environments, professional readiness tools, and community-engaged research, each investigating how design mediates access to complex, often restricted domains.
Primary Case Studies
Nantucket XR: Harbor Visualization Project
Featured Case Study — Current ResearchA virtual heritage installation built for the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Standing on the museum's roofwalk, viewers look through a 180° spatial reconstruction that overlays the historic harbor onto the landscape in front of them, aligning what they see digitally with where they're standing physically.
Interactive 180° Experience
Methodology
This 180° spatial narrative was reconstructed using a combination of 19th-century Sanborn maps, lithographs, and archival photography from the Nantucket Whaling Museum. The digital environment was built at a 1:1 spatial scale to align with the physical roofwalk elevation of the museum, allowing for a seamless 'Temporal Telescope' experience.
Technical Workflow:
- Modeling: Accurate architectural reconstruction of the Steamboat Wharf and surrounding harbor infrastructure
- Spatial Alignment: Calculated viewpoint elevation to match the museum's observation deck, ensuring proprioceptive alignment for VR binocular users
Liberty Hall 360: A Revolutionary Wedding
Foundational Case Study — Established ResearchA 2020 NY Emmy®-nominated immersive experience in two formats: ultra-widescreen digital HD and 360° Virtual Reality. Produced at Kean University in collaboration with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the Liberty Hall Museum in Union, NJ.
Interactive 360° Experience
Collaboration: Large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration: students, faculty, staff, alumni across graphic design, history, communication, writing, and theatre.
Creative Technology & Professional Readiness
This research explores how purpose-built software tools and clear visual systems can remove the barriers between design students and the professional landscape they're preparing to enter, making career pathways visible, navigable, and honestly structured.
CraftRole: Navigational Scaffolding for Person-Environment Fit
Beta Test In ProgressCraftRole is a structured career-matching tool that helps design students identify professional pathways aligned with how they actually work, not just what they studied.
Role Taxonomy: UI/UX
Mobile Experience
Desktop Experience
Students explore a structured taxonomy of creative industry roles, mapped to real-world practice areas and emerging fields.
The tool surfaces role-environment fit by matching student competencies and interests to specific professional pathways.
Scaffolded outputs guide students toward actionable next steps — portfolio focus, internship targets, and degree alignment.
MajorSpec: Designing Dignity-First Hardware Literacy
Alpha Phase / Peer-Review PipelineAn agency-centered hardware advisory framework designed to bridge the technical gap in design education through major-specific stability floors.
CraftRole maps students to career pathways based on work style and creative strengths, while MajorSpec provides the technical infrastructure to get there. Together, they form a professional readiness system built from inside the classroom.
Spectrum Framework: UI/UX
Desktop Experience
Mobile Experience
Wait for the render — Thoughtful workflow with time for iteration and refinement
Balanced speed — Real-time preview with moderate complexity and responsive feedback
Immediate feedback — Fastest iteration for rapid prototyping and experimentation
Community Agency & Social Impact
Beyond the lab and the museum, this work extends into community-engaged research through collaborative design. By partnering with community organizations on public health and social equity initiatives, these projects build visual communication tools alongside the people who use them. The goal is always the same: clear, lasting resources that communities can own and sustain on their own terms.
The following projects operate through the Happiness Collaborative, a community-engaged design platform co-founded with Denise Anderson.
Reflection Booth: Latino Perspectives on Language, Race, and Ethnicity
Civic Agency — Spatial ReclamationA participatory installation developed in partnership with the 2026 MACLAS Conference that creates a semi-private, multilingual space where participants engage with audiovisual prompts and record their own reflections on how time, place, cultural objects, and memory shape the Latino diaspora. The experience moves through a sequence of questions that begin with challenging topics and gradually shift toward nostalgia, surfacing memories of heritage and home. The installation is designed so that participants leave feeling connected to their culture and fulfilled by it, particularly in a moment when that identity is actively challenged.
Sembrando Semillas / La Pica
Ongoing Research — Digital Twin & Community MemoryDevelopment of a high-fidelity digital twin and VR experience for the community of Jayuya, Puerto Rico. This project explores the intersection of spatial accuracy and cultural preservation, reimagining a decommissioned youth detention center as a community-driven hub through immersive visualization and community-engaged learning.
SuperAdobe: Local Earth, Global Practice
Ongoing Research — Documentary & Reflective InquiryA documentary investigation into how collaborative design-build projects generate community, happiness, and enjoyment. Through reflective interviews with the build team, the project examines what emerges socially and emotionally when people make something together with their hands.