January - May 2022

The Summit teachers find it difficult to use external curricula in the Summit Learning Platform (SLP) because it only supports the structure of internal curriculum. Also, the fragmented user flow in the platform does not match the information flow the classroom.

SLP will help teachers differentiate seamlessly for their students’ needs in the classroom, by enabling them to include projects from external curricula in their course.

This redesign was a highly impactful project for the whole education initiative, since it would eventually affect every team working on different parts of the SLP. So it needed a lot of communication, cross collaboration with designers and PMs of the other teams, and evaluation of feasibility and effort with the engineering team.

Also, since if stemmed from a strategy shift in our partner curriculum designers at Gradient Learning, alignment on the North star user experience, plus getting buy-in from them for the final structure was key to our success.

Eventually, the complexity of creating a streamlined experience for our users, revealed by this project, shifted the CZE business strategy to point solution approach rather than responding to all their needs in a giant tech solution like the learning platform. Now, SLP 2.0 is being developed to integrate with a third-party tool, and SLP 1.0 is updated based on the minimum improvement recommendations provided by us.

Lead designer (Shay), product designer, content strategist, UX researcher, PM, Eng Lead, Data Scientist, 3 Learning Scientists

Lead designer: lead design and Research, Co-design Facilitation, Collaboration with XFN partners, Communicating the progress to the leadership and rest of the org

Surfacing user needs and the efforts needed to meet them helped leadership plan for an org strategy change, partially the founding steps of SLP 2.0, the next version integrated in Canvas platform.

Being the highest impact and largest scale project I’ve done at CZI, this project taught me how to make my work and my team’s efforts visible, how to communicate the upcoming changes and their implications with the other scrums, how to push the technical boundaries and leaders’ imaginations for what is possible.

Large-scale project, cross-scrum collaboration, org strategy shift, information architecture

2019

Prisoners of conscience are hidden from the cities and environments they fight for. The are in prison for standing with the truth, and believing in civic duty. Yet once they are arrested we forget their faces and they become a name and a number in the news.

Hidden Faces, with the magic of Augmented Reality, remembers and creates awareness about the prisoners of conscience back to the streets, by letting users project their portrait illustrations on the walls as murals. The app also provides information about the person, and the number of days they have been in the prison.

I made this app after my friends in Iran, a group of environmentalists, were imprisoned for a false accusation of espionage. Amirhossein Khaleghi, a collaborator in the I Wish For An Animal project, is one of them.

I started illustrating their faces as a way to remember them and calm myself, and I wish I could paint murals so that everyone would see and remember them.

I made illustrations of more than 60 Iranian political prisoners during that Spring.

Product designer & Illustrator (Shay) , Developer

Designer, Illustrator, Product Manager

People posted lots of videos on social media using the app, it also won an Honorable Mention in the Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas 2020.

This was my first project with Augmented Reality, and working with a developer on Upwork. There was so much to learn about project management, and technology.

Augmented Reality, Visual Design, Zero-to-One

Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2020

Fall 2016

Cancer patients need easy access to their lab results, manuals, medication list, journal, symptom notes, questions for their doctors, survivorship documentation, and more. They normally hauled everything in a heavy “chemo bag” from appointment to appointment, which could be frustrating.

Caresi will help cancer patients stay focused on what is needed at each point of their healing process, by keeping all their appointments, lab results, medications, care team, and resources in one place along with data entry features.

As the founding designer, my challenge with the information flow was implementing a system to help people find what they were looking for when needed. What a cancer patient needs to know or track changes in different stages of diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.

Design research was a living piece of our strategy. Along with observing different departments and services at the clinic and searching for improvement opportunities, I constantly examined my findings with patients through interviews and shadowing. Also, recurring surveys with patients helped verify the dispersion of different problems and concepts.

Also, our prototyping process was extensive. We tested out real-time prototypes of every feature with at least 4% of users each time. Concepts had less text, which in theory, would boost clarity, but users didn’t like how empty those designs felt. So we partnered with the care team to be present in the research sessions to provide context.

Founding Product Design, UX Research, Communication with XFN partners

When I left SCCA we had grown our user base to ~300 patients, who actively contributed to the design of the app.

This was my first job as a Product designer outside of the academia. I learned how to educate non-designers about the impact of design, I honed in on my interaction design skills. I became savvy at connecting research to tangible design decisions, and at working with cross-functional partners like data scientists, PMs, and engineers.

Zero-to-one project, Cross-team collaboration, Web app, iOs app

2015

For urbanites, being removed from the reality of cycle of life and how things are produced, before we receive them in shiny packages, it creates an illusion of limited impact on the environment. As a consequence of this misunderstanding we drink our morning coffees, put our iPhones in the pocket our faux-fur coats, and drive our cars to work thinking these decisions have limited impact on the wildlife and their habitats.

Through this multiplayer mixed-reality game, players are on a three-day mission to save the wildlife surrounding their imaginary city, by making day-to-day mundane decisions.

The game has two components: the physical model of the city with the players, and the virtual component of text messaging.

The game-play starts from the physical space where players visit the model city. They register their phones to receive text messages, and after getting the instructions, leave. For the next three days they can play from wherever they are, but there are bonus missions for those who come back to the center point.

After connecting to a server, the platform we built, replied to players through a decision tree based on the game scenarios. The attributes of each scenario were reflected in 9 data sections (players, objects, locations, animals, missions, etc.).

Meanwhile the physical model of the city is transformed by the game master based on the decisions they make: tracking players’ footprints, killing animals, destructing locations, etc. In the last day, they come back to the center point and have a group conversation with the team about the game and the wildlife conservation.

Designer (Shay), Wildlife Conservationist (Amirhossein Khaleghi), Developer (Mahyar Tarafdar), Advisors (Tad Hirsch, Karen Cheng, Dominic Muren)

Design, Research, Building the physical model and game vignettes, Content strategy and writings scenarios

Surprisingly the questions asked at the end of the game were those I wished would be raised which showed that part of the goals of the game were met: to ignite wonderings in players’ minds and put them in the place of decision-makers. Players said that the scenarios could be more profound and, at the same time, wanted the game to be longer because they needed more time to get used to the rule sets and the logic of the game.

Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, the NGO I worked with, was amazed by the response rate they received from visitors and players. They proposed to support the game in its future attempts.

The significance of this project to me was trying a process that transformed an idea into a testable artifact. With all the mistakes and failures, I learned the long road from theory to practice and the complications and logistics of implementing a collaborative design project.

Game design, Zero-to-One, Mixed-reality

Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
Dastaan Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran

AIGA (Re)Design 2015

Arcade Magazine Issue 33.3

2012 - 2013

Different villages in Iran

“The Flying Classroom” is a volunteer project that started in Iran in 2012. Driven by their dedication to social activism and art, a group of passionate artists joined forces to advocate for beautification, sustainability, and respect for nature in underprivileged regions of the country. The project's main emphasis lay on empowering children, and schools acted as the central venue for its initiatives. Each trip spanned 4-5 days, during which the team conducted art workshops for students and worked together with them to enhance the school's design using their own handcrafts.

The idea behind our project was to empower children to improve their living environment without having to relocate to big cities or rely on external assistance. In addition to the art classes, we engaged them in discussions about the environment, self-expression, self-care, and health. This approach encouraged them to examine their surroundings and discover opportunities to enhance their situation.

Early in the project, we chose to collaborate with Mehr Giti Charty, a nonprofit organization that constructs schools across the country with funding from philanthropists. This partnership played a vital role in organizing the trips and maintaining our independence. Although it provided some protection from government investigations, we still faced challenges along the way.

Design, Installation

Throughout our journey, we discovered the importance of not predefining the concept of each trip. In one instance, we chose to visit a village named 'Tokhme baloot' in Ilam, expecting to find a region abundant with oak trees based on our desk research. However, upon arriving, we were astonished to find vast meadows instead of the expected oak forests. We learned that the locals had to cut the trees for heating as they lacked gas supply. In response to this revelation, we swiftly adapted the theme of the trip to focus on saving the environment to preserve the native animals, such as squirrels and robins, in the area. This experience taught us to remain open-minded and flexible, allowing us to address the real needs and concerns of the communities we visited.

During our third trip to the village of Hajiabad, located near Birjand in the Eastern part of Iran, we focused our concept on water and rain due to the prolonged droughts in the region. Alongside storytelling, health, and music classes, we conducted workshops where students crafted small fish dolls, Origami cranes, and musical instruments mimicking the sound of rain. Utilizing all these artifacts, we created a captivating “room of rain” within a section of the school's hall. This immersive experience aimed to bring the essence of rain and water to life for the students, encouraging a deeper understanding of and appreciation for these essential elements.

Arcade Magazine Issue 32.3