Hi, I’m Helen, a designer and software engineer making complex systems clearer, kinder, and easier to use.
Header artwork: Pillars of Memory original composition, rendered with Midjourney.
Featured Work
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NASA Playbook Constraints
Making invisible scheduling rules readable, visible, and actionable for mission planning.
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NASA Playbook Iconography
Redesigning a visual language for faster recognition in a dense NASA scheduling tool.
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Spotify (Re)Wrapped
Helping listeners rediscover the songs they saved, loved, and accidentally buried.
Side Explorations
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Pillars of Memory
Transforming everyday phone photos into translucent towers of color, light, and almost-remembered places.
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Vessels of Memory
Phone photos transformed into glowing acrylic vessels, preserving everyday memories as delicate objects of light.
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Swift, Styled
An AI-assisted visual experiment translating Swift and SwiftUI concepts into tactile, high-fashion metaphors.
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Rodimus: Designing Trust Around Waste
A speculative AI concept exploring how feedback, visibility, and system trust shape everyday recycling behavior.
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Virtual Vogue: Testing Embodied AR
An HCI study exploring whether virtual clothing can influence attention, creativity, and self-perception.
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Optimizing the Brew: A Coffee Ritual
A tiny time-motion study using human-factors methods to reduce friction in an everyday dorm coffee routine.
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Mixed (Im)Materiality
A soft motion study of color, light, and the shifting boundary between physical and digital material.
Experimental Systems
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Into the Poppyverse: An Interactive Map
A spatial interface for exploring relationships across a nonlinear fictional universe.
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The Engine Codex
An experimental archive for organizing a large speculative taxonomy of engines, drives, entities, and related phenomena.
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Latent Exploration
Coming soon.
About
Helen He designs technology around people.
At Stanford University, she studied computer science, human-computer interaction, AI, and architectural design: disciplines that shaped her interest in complex systems and how they can be made clearer, kinder, and more usable.
In quieter hours, she likes to illustrate and photograph stray light patterns on walls.