The therapist's office can be stressful. loud white noise, complete isolation, often very cold. The most stressful part of all? Talking. A lot of therapists struggle to connect with their patients because often patients find that it's hard to lay out their story in an understandable way. Sob Stories is a module - based board game that allows patients to lay out their stories in a tangible way and show their therapists how they progressed through them. Each module represents a different part of experiencing and processing bulling and together they make up a course that a marble can move through, these modules magnetize to each other to create a path. The patient can then explore their story with the marble, explaining it to the therapist along the way. Each piece is made out of cherry stained wood and complemented by the weighty steel marble.

The Family Tree is a living time capsule for extended families, allowing each family their own specific branch to share memories, hardships, or joyful moments with one another as a means to bring the family closer together with these shared moments available to share for generations. 

In my Family Tree, the trunk represents my cousin, Brad, who died of a brain tumor at age 13. During the one year from when he was diagnosed to when he died, all 75 extended family members connected in ways we never had before. I thought it would be appropriate to create a base in his memory, with “B LISKA” written on the side of the tree trunk, which was the license plate he wanted oto have on his first car. I created the branches to represent the various extended families that make up my larger one, with caps labeling each family’s last name and designated repository. Anyone in the family can use the vessel to share special memories and aspirations as keepsakes for other family members to view and future generations to see. 

The Brief:

Memory Keys: This project is a vessel meant to help people connect with loved ones through music. "Keys" achieves this through sound vibrations and as a vessel that holds very important memories.

In this project, users are meant to "play" wooden keys that resemble the action one would use when playing the piano. This  project is based off of the piano but uses simpler mechanics to achieve sound. Instead of a hammer hitting a string, "Keys" uses a metal ball to hit copper to create sound. Apart from being somewhat of a meditative tool, "Keys" is based on a special form of communication I had with my grandmother.  For me, this project is a very important part of honoring her memory and moving on. For others, when using this, my hope is that they can connect with people they may have lost and help refresh their memory of them. 

Hugo:

The Memory Capsule is based on impactful moments in Mary-Ann's life, particularly those involving animals or loved ones. The project is similar to matryoshka dolls, in that it is a physical representation of a very impactful memory surrounded by other, less impactful memory's representations.

The project is a physical representation of multiple slightly impactful physical representations of memories, in the form of a wooden box. It is made out of wood and is multiple objects wrapped around each other to be unraveled during the telling of a story, and at the center of all of the boxes is a mirror, to show how all of these memories come together to create the person Mary-Ann is today.

Lalita:

This project is representing the different moments and memories that had an impact on Mary-Ann's life. This project is based on the matryoshka dolls where the most important memories are smaller and the less important memories are larger surrounding the smaller memories. 

The final project helps Mary-Ann (a senior at Mount Pleasant Home) tell her stories and how these memories changed her. While she is telling the stories she will reveal what is in each of the wooden figures one bye one to remember and tell her story. The boxes consist of about 4 layers: the outer layer which is a duck, the second layer represents her trip to Ireland, the third layer signifies that she has had to deal with diabetes, and the last layer is a mirror that means that all of these memories make the person that she is today. 

Link to presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c4D_ucNDzVleGZCIKFS_FKLTLUgSu066/view?usp=sharing

The StoryBox is an image processing program that preserves moments through sound. In a world full of visual snapshots of life, rarely are those moments simultaneously captured through music. The StoryBox software allows images throughout time to be captured and composed into a series of auditory experiences. 

Towns, cities, and landscapes are constantly evolving. With the threat of climate change transforming and destroying the earth's natural beauties, war destruction, and new development, an image alone can not preserve or capture the full experience of a place before it disappears. For this project, the StoryBox captures archived images of Palestine pre-colonization. As more and more land is annexed, it is important to create multiple different preserved representations of the beautiful landscape. The natural scenery and towns were then processed and programmed to create an auditory interpretation of the image. By analyzing the colors, depth, and outlined shapes of the images, the software was then able to assign notes and compose a sound.