Unreal Engine Dream Team educators: Chris Allen, Marc Dubeau, and David Conover are teaming with Calvin Mays (Qubicle Design), IBM SpaceTech’s Chief Technical Officer Naeem Altaf, and Senior Software Engineer Minsik Lee in an effort to democratize access to space. This multi-staged project will begin by creating lesson plans to increase student knowledge and awareness of outer space, and will culminate into a Digital Twin of a low-orbit satellite launch, and local outer space.

The goal is to upload our Digital Twin to the IBM cloud to allow for Pixel Streaming on a variety of platforms. This would allow students to both see our Virtual Production Video(s) and also play the game from a variety of platforms. In the post-launch phase, students will learn to interact with the satellite. This interaction will include a combination of downloading and uploading data (commands) to the satellite. Post-launch, we will conduct user interviews and observe students, to learn how they interact with the digital twin, as well as understand their visions for the future of low-orbit satellite design and exploration.

Design Jam for Mental Health

Innovation Week 2018: Austin TX

I had a great opportunity to showcase my design and facilitation skills at People Fund, by leading a room of 40 non-designers through an innovation workshop I created. The idea was to get a room full of strangers to choose a direction and collaborate to build something they all believed in. The output of this session was that within an hour, I had four separate groups designing a portfolio of new products and services based on the concept of lemonade stands. The most rewarding part of this workshop was the feedback received from the group once they presented their concepts— they all wanted to continue exploring their concepts by building prototypes and testing them within the local market.

Texas Appleseed is a public interest justice center working to change unjust laws and policies that prevent Texans from realizing their full potential. During our first design workshop cycle, we were able to produce several concepts with the potential to make an immediate impact on the outcome of policy making. The next step is to develop those concepts into working prototypes that become community projects.

The Community Resilience Trust was built out of a core belief that we must create systems that inherently are equitable and resilient. This community platform is created because we understand that no system alone is independent, and that in order for our most vulnerable and overlooked communities to succeed, we need to create systems that make sure everyone is treated equitably and with dignity. Therefore, this group is for community leaders who are here to fill in the gaps, serve as the connective tissue, and work behind the scenes to ensure that we all weather the storm in times of crisis.

Design is historically rooted in communities of privilege. How it is applied when working with a coalition of truly diverse communities requires facilitators and stakeholders to account for how privilege has impacted different communities, develop a comfort level with discussing inequity and an openness to reimagining the design thinking process itself to adapt to facilitate greater equity.