Hello 👋️ I’m Jessica,
NYC based Product Designer and Creative Technologist

I solve problems through product building and management with my interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice which involves computing, design, art, and business.

👾 tech 💭 design 🎮 media 💸 business

Select Projects

I bridge the gap between product and experience design.

My work is at the intersection of emering media and purposeful applications.

PRODUCT SERVICE DESIGN ⎤

Design + Tech ⎤

Management ⎤

MI: Mycelium Intelligence “Exploring AI and Nature's Network."

June 2024

This installation showcases the parallels between mycelium networks and artificial intelligence, emphasizing connectivity, adaptability, and collaboration. Surrounded by the ambient sounds of these earthy-growing connections, participants interact with generative visuals projected on sinewave panels and bricks made from myco-foam, a material grown from mycelium. These panels serve as both visual displays and audio insulators, while the bricks demonstrate eco-sustainable building possibilities.

Creative Impact Lab 2023

Creative Impact Lab Amman 2023

Exhibition Curatorial Statement

Butterfly Echoes

Amer Shawabkeh

Hamzeh Aljab

ComGame — Love Over Fear

Sondos Al-Zaben

Yafa Darweesh

Noor Zahran

Human Touch

Leena Amayiri

Mushroom Field — Upcycling

Radwan Beshr

Ehsan Naimat

Yara Al Qawasmi

Belal Joudi

Heba Qatabi

Through the Looking Glass

Nazeeha Khalid

Moumen Bilbeisi

Waiting

Mohammad Qattan

Maryam Al-Taher

Farah Qutaishat

Rahmeh Omat

Yellow Point

Raghad Al Malkawi

Project Amal

Nasser Alabdallah

A Matchbox Dream

Immersive experience
Projection mapping
Interaction design

Apr - May 2021

‘A Matchbox Dream’ immersive experience lies somewhere between dreams and reality. Intense and colorful visuals portraying the vivid dreams one gets, with the possibility of staying in the moment by interacting with the surrounding environment through touching surfaces that activate light and sound. Entering a space of dream and reality immerses the participant in the built environment and set design elements.

Spring 2021
Created for MFA DT projection mapping studio

Installation Description

Concept
The installation is a depiction of the in-between space between dream and reality. The aim is to have the participant immersed in the dreamscape while experiencing reality through physical elements (interactive sculpture, headpiece, interactive frame, hologram window). The physical elements are interactive, further playing on the duality of the real and the virtual.

Description

This projection focuses on 3 main elements:

Projected visuals

Interactive objects/surfaces

Physical set design

Interactive

Interactive Objects:

Sculpture

Frame

Art piece

Worked with Bare Conductive Arduino MP3 Touch Board, conductive paint,copper wires sticker, mesh textile, white spray paint, and silver colored paper, boxes, paper printouts, other set design elements such as a long mirror, peacock feathers, and rose gold decorative curtain. Added a headpiece used on top of a styrofoam head which serves as a face.

Created a big 3 dimensional sculpture to give the space more life and depth.

Using the MIDI Bare conductive for interactivity and initiating color changes and animation. By touching a surface, it will activate a light trigger through madmapper. In addition, sounds through the microphone trigger animation on a white surface, using Mad mapper.
I designed and printed out directive notes for the user to “Touch Here” and “Explore”. Positioned them beside trigger touch points.

Including a 3D element in the space, a sculpture I created and added my ‘Future Earth - 2019’ headpiece on top of it. The headpiece contains built in light. The sculpture has an extension spot in front of it, which is connected to an arduino touch board which is in turn connected to MadMapper and causes an animation to play on the styrofoam head.

I also created 2 touch spots on a frame and hung it up on the wall. Touching any of the 2 black painted circles will in turn cause a flowy animation to begin playing inside the frame.

As for the art piece, an animation plays on its surface when speaking into the microphone.

Visuals
I used 6 originally created animations.

Hologram on the window using mesh.

I created all my animation assets on After Effects. Used bright, warm colors: yellow, orange, blue, pink, red, and green.

Media

Projection mapping immersive installation with interactive elements.

Installation plan

Tech diagram

Equipment list

BenQ Projector x1 (3200 ANSI Lumen High brightness and 13,000:1 High Contrast)
Bare Conductive MP3 Touch Board x1
Mesh screen
Copper wire tape
Conductive paint
Shure SM58 Microphone - USB cable
Speaker - Amazon Echo
Laptop
Ambient light x1
Medium projector tripod
Lightning to HDMI adapter
HDMI Cable
Micro Usb 2.0 to USB cable
Cable connectors
Pro Sony camera
Iphone camera
Go pro camera
Samsung phone camera
Phone tripods x2

Set Design

Own creation headpiece - Future Earth 2019
Styrofoam head
Peacock Feathers
Wall frame
Decorative Silver paper
Boxes
Crepe paper
Rose Gold Decorative Curtain
White medium box
Printouts / White paper
White spray paint
White sheets x2

SAGE
JAN - MAY 2021

Sage is an app that helps home cooks efficiently find ingredients in their city, including necessary information, and usage tips.

Tags:
UX, Product Design, Design Thinking,

Case Study

ROLE Designer, Researcher, Ideation, Presenter, Result analysis

TOOLS Figma, UsabilityHub

PROCESSES
Design Thinking
Product Design
UX/UI Design
User Research
Personas
A/B testing
ADA

Pitch deck

Scroll down for the full case study

Case Study

Objective

Ingredient Finding Mobile App

Outcome
Clickable Prototype

Process

Interviews

Personas

Design

MVP Features Matrix

Userflow Chart

Early sketches | Wireframes

A/B Testing

Usability Hub Tests

I tested a series of our wireframes with usability hub and asked the users to:

navigate the wireframes
complete the task of looking up the availability of ingredient “ajwain seeds” in the area.

Version 1.0.0

Version 1.0.1

Testing results

80% of our user pool falls into the age range 20–40. This reflects our personas and target user age group, but we still included a few users from an older age group to consider these other perspectives.
The results offered us a few interesting discoveries. The majority of the users are able to navigate through the frames until the ingredient page, where they have to click on the drop-pin icon to find the ingredient on the map. Only 57% of the users on that page successfully completed this step. This suggests that perhaps the icon itself is not clear enough to communicate its function and that perhaps we would need texts to accompany the icon or a separate button with texts.
This has also brought to our attention that perhaps a shortcut button to the map search should be included on the home page, potentially in place of the “drop a pin” button. In addition, we also realized that the burger menu on the home page could also cause confusion because its function is unclear. It almost serves as a stand-in button-for-all at this moment. In our next iteration, we could consider replacing the burger menu with a user profile button. More iterations and tests are needed for us to fully determine the changes in this area.

Version 2.0

Info page List to share

Version 2.1

Onboarding

User testing synthesis

Testing results ︎︎︎

After reviewing the testing results, we decided on the following as the guiding principles for our design
Design Principles

Accessibility, Aesthetic- Confirmation & Consent, Usability Effect, Hierarchy of Needs

Aesthetic Principles

Highlighting (such as making a button green to be pressed), Iconic Representation (icons across the page for similar indication of ingredient, map, home, back…)

Information Display Principles

Progressive Disclosure (For the ingredient page) Feedback Loop (adding info on map + reusing it in the ingredients search) Chunking (combining many units of information into a limited number of units or chunks, so that the information is easier to process and remember. ie: recipes, ingredients, cuisines)

Reflection

One of the challenges that have surfaced during the creation of our wireframes has been how best to approach (or avoid) design iteration without a clear brand identity. There is a balance to be struck between the focus on usability at this stage, and the need for certain basic design elements that can be used to inform the user in important ways through emphasis, de-emphasis, color coding, imagery, iconography, etc. It is rather easy to get hung up on even the most simple methods for indicating the brand mark (“why is it a circle?”), color hierarchy (“why green?”, “lets stay away from red”), tints, drop shadows, etc. Without a clearly defined brand identity, these decisions risk taking on a lot of undue significance and attention when it appears that our primary concern at the wireframe stage is with how well our product functions.

As designers, we always strive for the perfect combination of form and function (except when we don’t), but this is easier said than done, and so this feels like an important inflection point.

A Park of the Future
SEP - DEC 2021

A Park of the Future is a semi-speculative park of an imagined future reality of an existing park in Brooklyn, New York. This park has been created as an immersive experience in VR, built in Unity and some of the elements have been designed & 3D modeled in SketchUp.

Tags:
Design, Product Design, VR, Mixed Reality

ROLE Designer, Experience Designer, XR Designer, Unity Developer, Researcher

TOOLS
Unity, SketchUp, Figma, Slides