Meet the 2019 residents.

Working at the intersection of food, sustainability, and UI/UX, Julie is exploring how human-centered design solutions can inspire a circular food system. She’s conducting research and engaging with thought leaders to create a design series focused on preventing, repurposing, and redirecting food waste. Along the way, she’s sharing her design process with the community and inspiring others to redesign the world around us. Post-residency, she wants to work as an experience designer and leverage emerging technologies to build a better tomorrow.

Patricia is exploring the city of the future and how new technologies like AI, voice control, and augmented reality will change our interfaces and design decisions. She’s focusing on the areas of new work, living, and mobility, and she’s sharing every step of her design process to get people excited about the possibilities of UX design. Post-residency, she’d like to work with companies that share her passions for problem-solving and using new technologies to benefit society.

Takuma is spending his residency developing self-made hardware and software systems to achieve new visual experiences. By collaborating with artists from different fields, he hopes to achieve his creative goal of applying digital aspects to physical spaces, and to light up the world with visuals that people have never before experienced.

Passionate about storytelling, Tyler is creating a video series that shares his experiences as an emerging artist alongside the experiences of established artists who are navigating their influence. He’s posting to Instagram and YouTube each day to bring the community into his creative process. In the future, he hopes to keep telling stories that help people feel less intimidated at the prospect of following their dreams.

Octavia is spending her year creating illustrations related to the theme of The Joyful Everyday — the idea that happiness can be found in the minutiae of daily life. She’s sharing her progress via process videos, blog posts, and social media updates. In the future, she’d like to turn her obsession with stationery into an illustrated journal. She also hopes to do more international editorial work and build a beautiful, honest brand that connects with people.

During her residency year, Aiko is creating a pop-up book that brings together analog and digital illustrations with augmented reality (AR). She’s also offering design workshops and online tutorials to engage with the creative community. Ultimately, she hopes to publish her magical book, and she’d also like to work with luxury brands and innovative companies that align with her aesthetic approach.

Juan José’s Impossible Stories project is a series of images from daily life that are manipulated to create a fictional reality. His residency is enabling him to share his creative process, get feedback from the community, and expand his storytelling tools and techniques. In a few years, he’d like to be a creative director whose focus is on making ideas visually tangible.

For her project, Seeing Music, Amelie is working with musicians to visualize their lyrics in the form of surreal artistic scenes. As she builds backgrounds and props, poses the musicians, and creates her artwork, she’s sharing her creative process from start to finish on social media. Her future plans include finding representation for her art and photography, creative-directing music videos and short films, and being hired by theaters, musicians, and actors to visualize their ideas in photos.

Cyn is working to help aspiring artists understand the mindset and practice of visual storytelling. She’s creating a visual methodology that will cultivate one-on-one learning experiences and empower artists in the realms of photography, graphic design, and videography. She hopes to create an educational movement within social media to enrich the content we absorb, and she’d like to create an academic resource as well. Longer-term, she’d like to focus on philanthropic efforts to create stories that illuminate the culture of the streets.