Coffy
Lessig.

A long-form photographic study of the railroad bridge beneath the BU Bridge and the tracks that extend from it. I've been drawn to this site for years and photographed it informally many times. Open Innovation gave me the chance to study it seriously — returning across multiple visits to look closely at structural details, materials, and signs of change over time.

The project treats a familiar piece of local infrastructure as a subject worth sustained attention rather than background.

I've been riding electric unicycles for years and wanted to tell the story of the community that grew up around them. This documentary covers the full arc — from the 1869 Hemmings monowheel through the first commercially available EUCs in 2008 to today's high-performance Chinese-manufactured wheels — and puts local riders at the center of it.

I shot with a Mirrorless camera, a 360 cam and my GoPro, conducted original interviews, and handled all editing, audio, and voiceover myself. The process pushed me to think about what makes a documentary compelling, not just accurate: how to let subjects speak for themselves while still building a coherent story.

ADA Compliant Dress is a statement piece designed to make able-bodied people physically experience what it's like to navigate a world that wasn't built for them. The dress prevents normal movement in any space that fails to meet ADA standards — wrong doorway width, non-compliant handrails — forcing the wearer to create a scene simply by existing in the environment.

Noelle and I developed the pattern from scratch, combining a structured hip piece with straight and circle skirt panels. The conflict the dress creates is intentional: it's meant to make bystanders ask why the space is the problem, not the person.

I wanted to replace the standard VR controller with something more intuitive — a glove that tracks individual finger movements and lets you interact with virtual environments using your actual hand. Starting from an existing open-source build, I adapted the design to use spring-loaded potentiometers for flex sensing, retractable badge reels for positional tracking, and an ESP32 for wireless communication with a Meta Quest 2.

Each finger got a custom cap and guide node to keep sensors aligned during motion. The glove was functional and gave me a solid foundation to build on — haptic feedback was next on the list.

Standard circuit boards depend on rare earth metals that are energy-intensive to mine and nearly impossible to recycle cleanly. Our team designed a substitute that uses conductive paint in place of etched metal traces — making the board biodegradable at the consumer scale.

For industrial use, we developed a reclamation process: dissolving the board in water and recovering the metals through existing water treatment techniques. The project was a systems-level exercise in thinking past the object — asking not just what the board is made of, but what happens to it at the end of its life.

This project came from a client who had a hard time noticing or communicating when they felt joyful — the feeling would pass before they could hold onto it. I designed a small wearable that lets you mark a moment of joy as it happens: press it, and it logs the time and GPS location.

At the end of the day it generates a physical light map — LEDs placed at each location, glowing at different intensities based on how often you activated the device there. The result is a personal artifact that makes an invisible emotional pattern into something you can actually look at.

I bought a Begode Master — one of the more demanding electric unicycles on the market — and disassembled it to understand it at the component level. From there I designed and printed a full set of protective and performance accessories: bumpers, side fairings, and an extensive range of power pad variants, each tested at different infill percentages and wall counts to find the right balance of flex, grip, and durability.

I iterated on designs based on direct riding feedback and eventually sold parts to other riders in the local community. This is where I first became a technical resource for other people on the same platform.

Since acquiring a Leaperkim Lynx in early 2025, I've disassembled it roughly thirty times. Some rebuilds were repairs; others were deliberate modifications — swapping components with custom or salvaged parts from other wheels, reworking the suspension, and refining the exterior.

In parallel I became the go-to mechanic for the local riding community: tire changes, electrical diagnosis, troubleshooting wheels that had been damaged or were behaving unpredictably. This is ongoing work, not a finished project — but it represents the clearest example I have of sustained technical practice, hands-on problem-solving, and the kind of knowledge you can only build by taking the same machine apart over and over.

The Creator Factory was a studio built around philosophy, digital art, and the question of how to make prolifically across mediums. We covered digital character illustration in Photoshop, explored how AI fits into a creative process, studied traditional watercolor technique, and put on a real public gallery exhibition of our finished work.

My final piece was a watercolor painting made with Munther Elsayed — a loosely representational work using wet-on-wet technique. We also each built a digital character illustration that was printed and hung in the show. Guest speakers included artist Raghava KK and his studio director, who pushed us to think about what it means to make a lot of things and make them mean something.

Designed and built an interactive exhibit for The Discovery Museum in Acton, MA that teaches kids about magnet polarity through competitive play. The mechanic is a color-coded game where two players use magnetic handles to race their magnets across an acrylic board, with obstacles that slow you down.

I worked with Kaia Narbunshart and Sadie Wylie through multiple rounds of user testing — first at the museum, then at NuVu — iterating on handle design, polarity labels, corner safety, and visual clarity based on real observations of kids playing. The final version locked in the competitive format, reduced hazards, and included a maintenance door.

Land's Sake Farm in Wellesley, MA was constantly rearranging their education space for classes, birthday parties, and craft sessions, but had no tables that could survive rough terrain or store compactly. With Gabe Murray and Kaia Narbunshart, I designed a wheelbarrow-style table with large wheels for rough and smooth terrain, retractable handles, and a wheel-locking mechanism for stability once positioned.

We visited the farm, built lo-fi prototypes, and iterated based on direct feedback from staff and site visits. The final version lowered the table height from 34 to 30 inches for better accessibility and redesigned the handles so the table stores flat without creating hazards.

NuVu's rules and policy updates were scattered across emails and the platform — students usually found out about changes after the fact and had no channel for input. With Jasmine Horowitz and Noelle Aminoff, I built NüSVu: a centralized website where students can read about policy changes, vote in polls before decisions are finalized, and discuss updates in a public forum.

My focus was keeping the overhead low for coaches and student council — easy to post, no extra burden. We interviewed coaches, student council members, and students to design the right structure, and built in a section to spotlight student art and projects alongside the news feed.

As part of a studio on inclusive micromobility, our team focused on Southampton Street and Andrew Square in South Boston — an area with limited safe options for bikers and pedestrians. I researched MassDOT bike lane design standards, analyzed Blue Bikes data, and sketched redesigned crosswalks for busy intersections.

Working with Ari Sinert, Charlie Peterson, and Noelle Aminoff, we also reached out to planners behind PLAN: Newmarket, processed government crash data to identify the most dangerous infrastructure gaps, and mapped proposed interventions including bike lanes, bike boxes, and improved pedestrian crossings. The outcome was a suite of design proposals aimed at reducing car dependency and improving street safety in a historically underserved South Boston corridor.