Artist Statement

As a designer, the center of my practice is a concern with access and comprehension. I focus on how everyday design shapes who feels confident, confused, included, or excluded. Growing up using both Vietnamese and English made me aware of how instructions, labels, and layouts can block understanding or support it. As a result, I pay close attention to moments where users hesitate, misread, or disengage, and I treat those moments as design problems rather than personal shortcomings.

Several projects address language and learning directly. For instance, one uses animated type and AR to explore words that cannot be translated, where motion stands in for definition. Another takes the form of a board game that uses repetition and chance to show how people internalize systems through play.In a similar way, my UX work, including an app built for international students, examines how institutional processes are experienced from the outside, whereunclear instructions can carry real consequences.

Through my thesis, I extend these questions to everyday objects and visual systems more broadly. I ask who design serves when tools and interfaces are treated as neutral, and what shifts when they are approached as cultural and political structures. From this position, I use design to test how small changesin rules, layout, and framing can alter how people move through systems and assign meaning to what they encounter.