Imagined Realities: My Design Journey

The trajectory looks unusual from the outside: architecture school, fictional cities, VR mini-games, AI frameworks. From the inside, it has always been the same question — what does it take to design an experience that makes people imagine differently?

A Bachelor of Architecture gave me the technical vocabulary. Frankfurt's Städelschule gave me permission to use it dangerously. My Master's in Computational Design and Fictional Architecture confirmed the suspicion I'd been quietly developing: that space is an intellectual position. A room can question a norm. A building can be a provocation dressed in concrete. My thesis, *Uncanny Valley* — drawn from Fukuyama's post-human philosophy — depicted a city in which humanity had renegotiated its own definition. It was exhibited at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Germany. Architectural offices followed: Fuksas Studio in Rome, Helmut Jahn in Chicago. Years spent making the impossible feel structurally sound — mostly for international competitions, for buildings that would exist only in renders. I learned there that the gap between vision and material reality is not an obstacle. It is the design space.

In 2020, I formalised that instinct into a research programme. My PhD at ASU's Herberger Institute began as an inquiry into speculative design and virtual worldbuilding, and sharpened — as good research does — into a more precise question: what does it actually take to design an experience that cultivates imagination rather than merely simulates it? Under my advisor Robert LiKamWa, I led the development of Career XRcade: two VR learning applications, 50+ playful mini-games, released through Verizon Innovative Learning and presented at Games for Change in NYC and IEEE VR in Orlando. The research produced two design frameworks — the CXR Framework and Imagined Arcade — built around a specific idea: that the most generative creative space is the one occupied simultaneously by students, domain experts, and AI, each pulling the work somewhere no single author could have taken it alone. For two years alongside this, I ran worldbuilding and design-thinking workshops at ASU Game School — using game mechanics to make collective imagination feel less like a workshop exercise and more like a genuine act of making.

Tech startups followed. Products at the edge of emergent technology. These years refined my craft across interaction design, AR/VR, and product management, and they also crystallised the principle that now sits at the centre of my practice: Radical Collaboration. Not the kind where everyone is consulted and one person decides. The kind where designers, engineers, researchers, and algorithms are genuine co-authors — where the idea belongs to the process, not the person who started it.

Imagination began as my survival tool; now it is my method for rethinking and remaking the worlds around me. When reality breaks, I still close my eyes and imagine a cube that does not exist — only this time I invite the author, the reader, the narrator, and the agent into dreaming and experiencing it with me. Will you co-narrate, or simply witness? Every participant alters the story; nothing is assured. Either way, the game is ready.

PLAY.