Three years in Nicaragua
the making of 'Xocolat'​

To view the full gallery, visit Xocolat's Instagram page here.

The Sound of Chocolate
turning cartographic data into musical scores

​This exhibit was designed and built around the idea of finding new ways to interpret and share cartographic data. In mapping the major import and export locations of cacao and tracking chocolate’s primary, global routes from seed to finished product, I broke down a world map into a series of grids that could be read as a musical score.
 
The Sound of Chocolate exhibit challenges users to play music, as they interpret it, from this room of maps and engages all of the participants senses, including high-contrast, visual elements projected onto dynamic and ever-changing surfaces like fog, rotating spheres and glass walls, combining audio and tactile interactions with sound recordings and in-house, installed instruments for users to play within the space. There are also a variety of chocolates to taste and smell because, after all, this exhibit is about chocolate.  This exhibit changes drastically from user to user, offering limitless solutions for how to engage with the space. 

Household Instruments
one man's trash is another man's delta blues

​My childhood was rooted in Delta Blues and as an adult, I find myself most drawn to similar genres of music; raw, honest and heartfelt.  Always looking for design problems to tackle, I decided to begin building homemade, stringed instruments out of household items, limiting my materials to whatever I could find in the basement or in the baking aisle of an Iowan Salvation Army.
 
Building a guitar is an exact science. For everything to line up correctly, calculations and cuts must be exact. When your guitar is a roundneck resonator, whose internal coils are built from candleholders and pound cake pans, these calculations must be even tighter.

CMYK Wayfinding Signage
a word-free, international navigation system

​I challenge myself constantly to create international language systems that can be read and understood regardless of language or cultural barriers. For the Iowa State College of Design, I proposed a signage system, based on the CMYK color series, so direct users to popular rooms within the space, while combining secondary signage systems built into usable elements inside the college, like chairs, tables and drinking fountains. In conducting user testing, both inside and outside of the College of Design, I found that this system was generally understood and received well, even by users who were unfamiliar with the CMYK system.  

The tanzanian desert
​in downtown chicago
sharing important, paleontological discoveries

​In 2014, an important fossil was found in the grasslands of Tanzania.  A small dinosaur called Asilisaurus predated many of the existing dinosaur fossils that had been found in the area and reset the timeline of when Paleontologist believed that dinosaurs began roaming the planet. Working with these Paleontologists and a team of environmental designers that the Chicago Field Museum, I helped to design a small exhibit, maximizing user flow within the space and offering hands-on exhibits for guests to feel as though they had stepped into the fields of Tanzania.  
 
A series of plans, elevation and models were created to test and ensure optimal usability within the museum’s designated space.