Portfolio and Final Perspectives

I used this class to deepen my understanding of design and build on the work I began in my previous graduate degree, where I explored the relationship between design and emotion. I earned my master’s in 2022, focusing on space station design and human habitation in space. Space stations have always fascinated me—they’re fully man-made environments set in a context entirely unlike Earth.

As I’ve shared in earlier posts, I’ve always been curious about how design shapes the way a space *feels*. Design is an act of creativity, and creative spaces can be deeply moving. I was initially drawn to designs that bent the rules—spaces that were playful, weird, or surreal. Things like the multiple off-right angles of the Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland or the pastel, bubbly cartoon houses of Mickey and Minnie at Disney World sparked something in me early on.

I’ve been lucky to carry that passion into my career at Sierra Space, where I work on commercial space station design and build full-scale mockups. But what I appreciated about this class was the chance to explore that curiosity outside of my job—more freely, more experimentally.

Before this course, in my earlier work on Emotional Design theory, I treated design elements like color, shape, and texture as individual nodes in a system. I was trying to understand how combinations of those nodes could trigger emotional responses. It was complex, and I struggled to quantify it fully. But a few weeks into this class, while studying aesthetics, I had a breakthrough: rather than analyzing each part separately, I could look at the *aesthetic* as a whole. Aesthetics, after all, describe the emergent feeling from the combination of parts—the sum that’s greater than the pieces.

That shift led me to neuroaesthetics, which perfectly captured what I was trying to define: a data-informed design approach that shapes spaces around intended emotional or behavioral outcomes, regardless of what’s “typical” or expected. It’s strategic, functional, and deeply human.

I explored this idea in both my Upcycle and final projects, each from a different angle. For my Upcycle project, I made a lamp designed to spark playful conversation in a family room. I used vinyls and angled floating elements to evoke a sense of microgravity, tapping into personal emotional cues tied to space and curiosity. It worked—I still smile every time I see it in my music room, and it’s always a conversation starter when friends visit.

For my final project, I pushed further into the idea of neuroaesthetics applied to space habitats. I wanted to explore how varrying orientations changes your emotional perception of a space. The result was *The Emotional Space Station*, a section-cut model that changes aesthetic based on the angle you view it from. Each angle uses different colors tied to specific emotions, helping to show how spatial perception can shift emotional response.

This class gave me space to grow both conceptually and creatively. It helped me refine my approach to what I now think of as “Emotional Ergonomics,” and it gave me the chance to share ideas and hear fresh perspectives from classmates. I’m especially grateful for the feedback and discussions with my pod—they expanded how I think about my own research and inspired me to keep pushing these ideas beyond the classroom.