Awards on Charisse

Magic Moving Mansion Mania

Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

The Challenge: We had four months to make a mobile game. I was the Design Lead in a team of six: two designers and four programmers.

The Goal: To design and build a lovable mobile action-puzzle-platformer for iOS and Android.

Outcome

Magic Moving Mansion Mania is a mobile action-puzzle-platformer for iOS and Android. It was conceptualised and created in four months under the Game Design Initiative at Cornell (GDIAC).

Anastasia is lost in a magical mansion where the rooms move in mysterious ways.

Augmented Heritage Adventure (AHA!)

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Magical stories of talking animals, immortals, demons, and deities come to life through augmented reality.

AHA! (Augmented Heritage Adventure) revives the famed Qing Dynasty work of Zichuan-born writer Pu Songling: Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异), known in English as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Pu Songling’s residence in Zichuan has been preserved as a tourist attraction, and now his five hundred fantastic tales find new life in a gamified augmented reality adventure.

Oasis Waterpark

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Oasis Waterpark explores architectural memory through comics.

An illustrated journey through time and space, Oasis Waterpark tells of shared memories housed within one public playground. Each moment – joyful, familiar, comforting, playful, or poignant – is framed in a multi-panel comic, charting a narrative that contains the past, present, and future in the same place. This illustration pays homage to Frank King’s multi-panel comics of the 1930s, exploring the notion of place, imbued with meaning and memory, through the stories it contains: the structures in which we lose and find ourselves.

The Monument to the Labors

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Monument to the Labors tells an architectural fable in outer space.

Narrated dispassionately, The Monument to the Labors imagines a future that has already been translated into history. In this recasting of the pioneer narrative, the first settlers of space are not merely brave explorers but also condemned convicts. Centering around alienation and the implications of denying humanity to the other, the story simultaneously charts the lifespan of a building: a satellite, prison, laboratory, factory, town, tomb, billboard, attraction, and symbol. These two narratives tie the privilege of dreaming to the costs of experimentation. The utopian possibilities of outer space, the great unknown, are not only the fantasies of the privileged, but also the desperate hope of the marginalized.

The Art of Memory

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

Historic preservation is often a dry topic, with a large focus on regulations and conservation. Here, we take an experimental approach towards preservation, investigating architectural memory through travel, documentation, and speculative drawings.

The Art of Memory was a collaboration with Yichen Jia, made possible by the 2018-2019 Robert James Eidlitz Travel Fellowship. It was exhibited in NYC and MIT, and published in book form.

What does it mean to remember?

Sited in four Italian towns that have been indelibly changed by natural disasters, this project explores the notion of architectural memory. Across Pompeii, Catania, Poggioreale, and Gibellina, each town embodies a unique approach towards destruction and preservation. The ‘perfectly’ preserved ruins of Pompeii are set against the bustling capital of Catania, the ghost town of Poggioreale, and the crumbling modernist art installations of Gibellina.