Table of Contents
3 Rain Garden Monitoring & Future Modelling Study
2
5 “The concrete grows a....” Creative Exercise
#MeToo / (mi tu): Advocacy Postcard Set
6 UBC Climate Hub: Graphic Design Work Samples
7 The House of Modernity (2022, oil on canvas)
1 Travel & Landscape Photography
9
4 HOPEthiopia Farm Design: Humanitarian Engineering
8
Sketchbook Scans: Collages & Drawings
Keep Your Cards Close(d)!: a Lateral Thinking Project
Rain Garden Monitoring & Future Modelling Study
From 2023 Fall to 2024 Spring, I completed a practical research project alongside three group members and community partners from the University of British Columbia’s Campus + Community Planning (C+CP) department and the SEEDS Sustainability Program.
The project utilizes ‘Campus as a Living Laboratory.’ The study site is located at the UBC Campus Energy Centre (CEC), which has a system of three rain gardens (RGs), connected by a perforated pipe, to manage stormwater on site before it enters campus’ larger stormwater system.
My research team and I presented our findings at two research showcases in April and May of 2024, including the UBC Botanical Garden’s Biodiversity Research Showcase. I was responsible for the graphic design of our poster (left), including the illustration of the rain garden system which I created in Adobe Illustrator.
To conduct a comprehensive analysis of the site’s current and future performance, the project was comprised of three parts, each answering a different research objective:
Research Objective
1. How did the CEC RGs perform, in terms of peak flow reduction, during rainfall events between January 2024 to February 2024?
2. To what extent are the CEC RGs expected to mitigate flooding posed by climate-adjusted rainfall projections under storm event scenarios with a frequency of 2-year, 10-year, or 100 year return periods and varying storm durations ranging from 5 minutes to 24 hours?
3. What practices can be employed on the CEC RGs to improve their overall ability to manage projected future extreme weather events, based on existing literature around GRI maintenance guidelines?
Project Component
4-week performance monitoring study (field data collection + analysis)
Future performance modelling in the US EPA SWMM 5.2 software using design storms based on a ‘Business-As-Usual’ emissions scenario (RCP8.5; SSP5-8.5).
Recommendations guide for site maintenance and future research on campus.
Methodology Design
For our data collection methodology, I designed and sketched drafts of our apparatus, which were provided to the UBC Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences for reference to create the custom pieces our HOBO U-20 Water Level Loggers required.
Manhole design: Loggers suspended from a plank and submerged underwater.
Inlet design: Custom boxes inlets on the side of the RG submerged within the boxes.
boxes were created to fit depth and width of two RG 1 and RG 2. The loggers were secured and boxes.
‘The concrete grows a...’ is an ongoing personal creative exercise I started after reading and getting inspired by The Rose That Grew from Concrete, a poem by Tupac Shakur (see photo to the right).
His writing inspired me to look for and imagine the life that can emerge and grow out of urban landscapes.
The analogy of a rose growing from concrete resonates deeply with the framework of critical hope that I center in my life and work. Having spent a majority of my formative years in the concrete jungle of Beijing, his words echoed my experiences and understandings of resilience in the face of complex, flawed, and often austere urban landscapes. In this creative exercise series, I used my mobile phone to document instances of life emerging out of concrete I witnessed while navigating my daily life in urban environments and digitally illustrated new imaginings of them each in Procreate.
Theconcretegrowsa...
UBC Climate Hub: Graphic Design Work Samples
During my role as the Creative Communications Lead at the UBC Climate Hub, I was in charge of their communications strategy.
As part of my work responsibilities, I created a cohesive visual brand package (right) to express the bold, youthful, and action-oriented identity of this student-led climate justice organization.
The branding package includes a colour palette that I curated and 6 project logos I custom designed for each of the Hub’s project using Adobe Illustrator.
In 2022, I spearheaded the effort to create the Hub’s fourth annual report, co-authoring and independently designing the contents, layouts, and artwork for all 23 pages.
Spreads of the report are showcased in the following page.
#MeToo /(mi tu)
Advocacy Postcards
I created this postcard set for my DES 200: Design Thinking course. In this series, I aimed to spread awareness of the Chinese #MeToo movement and its challenges with censorship. The “rice bunny” concept was inspired by the alternative wording Chinese online activists use to avoid censors: 米兔 (pronounced as ‘mi tu’ - a phonetically similar to “me too”). Through the progression of cards, I wanted to show how activists are using their voices, building community, and participating in the larger global #MeToo movement despite barriers. These postcards were designed in Adobe Illustrator.
keepyour C RDSclose(d)!
As part of my DES 200: Design Thinking coursework, I designed and built a piggy bank using playing cards as the sole material, with no glue or tape. The assignment objective was to use lateral thinking skills to completely transform one object into another, whilst still connecting the two through a strong conceptual link. I chose to transform playing cards, which symbolize gambling, into a piggy bank for savings
— a lateral thinking project
HOPEthiopia: Humanitarian
In my humanitarian engineering course, I worked with an interdisciplinary team of engineering sustainable irrigation system for a farm in the Ethiopian highlands operated by an NGO
The two main deliverables of our project were an in-person poster presentation session made to faculty, students, and engineering industry professionals at the University of British Columbia (shown on the right), and a 34-page final report delivered to our partner organization. Our final proposed design not only detailed environmental and engineering solutions, but also provided actionable and community-oriented implementation plans informed by local political and social contexts.
Above: Site map of HOPEthiopia’s farmland. Below: Illustration of proposed irrigation design.
Humanitarian Engineering
engineering and political science students to develop a phytoremediation soil plan and called HOPEthiopia.
The House of Modernity
(2022, oil on canvas)
As a Catalyst Student Fellow at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, I created this oil painting (right) for an artistic course component. This piece was then exhibited in the Hatch Art Gallery’s 2024 Climate Catharsis exhibition. My artist statement is as follows: The intention of this painting was to invite reflections and evoke visceral, bodily reactions in response to the destruction of ‘the House Modernity Built,' a social cartography which examines the contemporary social structures and colonial architectures that limit our capacity to think and feel in the age of ‘modernity’ through the analogy of a house.
Although the House of Modernity is a structure that perpetuates violence, when faced with the possibility of it burning down, one must question whether this abrupt ending is just another form of quick-fix solutionism. To have enough self-reflexivity and self-awareness is, perhaps, to realize that our desire for happy endings and new beginnings is itself influenced by a larger culture of solutionism and a tendency to manipulate the continuous flow of events since time immemorial into a story with start and end. By resisting from constructing narratives of the world around our egos, we could engage with issues through sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility. Then, if we have the chance to start anew from the ashes of the House of Modernity, may we imagine new worlds free from fantasies of order, superiority, righteousness, and entitlement.
Landscape Photography
Sketchbook Scans:
Scans: Collages & Drawings
