Animations to raise funds for Ukraine

In September 2022, I started volunteering for an organization Frontline.live Ukraine. The organization is based around an open-source crowd-mapping platform that helps ensure donated supplies are delivered to displaced and injured Ukrainians.

My assignment was to manage social media content and communication materials. I accomplished that by creating animated gifs to raise funds and increase the urgency.

Art + Climate Action

In my last semester at Lehigh University, I wrote a research paper on how art is changing people's behaviors and empowering the community to climate action.

I looked at 3 international artists who are using their skills in visual communication to accelerate learning and motivate the public to climate action.

1. Olafur Eliasson

2. Zaria Forman

3. Xavier Cortada

Feel free to read my research paper and share your thoughts!

Activism through art

The research paper above spurred my creativity and made me wonder how I can express my thoughts and frustrations through art. During this time, I lived in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic, BLM protests, continuing gun violence, and climate crisis. Here is my art piece titled American Society.

The art piece contains multiple parts:

1. Parents teach their kids (the next generation) how to use guns, which creates a never-ending cycle of gun violence.

2. Children's hands (politician's hands) covering our eyes at the current state of the country and world.

3. Microplastic was found in unborn babies, so I tried to represent that with plastic bottles on the face, portraying how plastic is part of us or in us.

I understand that this piece shows a very bleak and pessimistic future and puts a critical view of the US. This is how I was feeling as a foreigner living in the US during the pandemic surrounded by rising COVID deaths, gun violence, and attention-grabbing media.

Hackathon for social impact using open data

On December 15th and 16th, we organized our first Klub Ada Hackathon for Social Impact using open data.

Accomplishments from the event:

40 participants developed a socially impactful solution using open data in 24 hours
20 mentors came to help steer the teams
6 sponsors helped fund the hackathon (Outbrain, Celtra, OUTFIT7, infinCUBE, tretton37, and Sportradar)
50/50 women to men attendance, which emphasized our commitment to creating a community to empower women to excel in technology careers
Solutions spanned from optimizing household electricity consumption to developing flood alerts, creating heatmaps for optimal housing, and even designing playground locators for families.