Glasgow Innovation School Product Design

Maria Marinescu-Duca (she/ her)

My practice revolves around social design with a focus on graphics and a passion for storytelling. I specialize in designing engaging everyday experiences for people, thinking about the bigger picture as well as considering the details. Primarily through digital work, I design for social change.

Contact
mariamarinescuduca@gmail.com
m.marinescuduca1@student.gsa.ac.uk
portfolio
linkedin
Works
Communicating Cancer
Digital Behaviours
Living Language

Communicating Cancer

Collective Intelligence is the new DNA of our society, based on sharing, human contact, openness, and empathy. People have a new approach in dealing with death and cancer, using new systems of immersion and expression to communicate through their emotions. We have chosen to represent this world in an abstract way to convey identities of communication that evolve beyond words and speech.
Our speculative future consists of a sensory-rich emotion database sourced and framed or demonstrated through created artefacts for the context. Its fundamental purpose is communicating cancer through empathetic experiences of family in all its senses. We portrayed three distinct scenarios and their respective implications; a family of strangers dealing with the same condition, a family of blood trying to understand one another and a family of love dealing with the grief that comes with one’s loss.

Exhibition Trailer

Taking the viewer through the website, the video briefly summarizes the intended experience.

Moving Forward

Suggestion of in situ exhibition aspect.

Digital Behaviours

Digital pollution is responsible for ≈ 4% of global CO₂ emissions, more than the entire civil aviation sector, almost as much as Russia and 4 times bigger than that of the UK. Due to the complex nature of the digital environment and newness of this threat, most people are still unaware even of its existence.

Digital Behaviours is a platform that responds to this environmental problem, encouraging digital frugality. The scope of the project is to reduce the digital carbon footprint and create awareness of the problem. It combats the data we are littered with, creating an exciting and mindful new narrative to the digital experience. Its direct impact is to let people know where they stand more precisely and how they can do better.

The services provided through the Digital Behaviours platform constitute in direct to action methods. They provide a clear guide on how to be respectful of the planet and of your electronic devices. The platform presents three direct to action ways in which you can get involved and become more digitally environmental. The service’s goal is to continuously educate people to the point where they are not as reliant on the service itself.

Project Hook

Bringing awareness is situated at the core of the project.

The Digital Assistant

Advertisement for the standout product promoting Digital Frugality.

Project Outcomes

The digital behaviour handbook, resource directory and digital assistant interface design.

Codesign Sessions

Throughout its duration, the project was informed and impacted by codesign sessions and workshops with possible users and industry experts.

Storyboard

Showcasing one of the multiple interaction points between the public and the software.

Living Language

Living Language is a speculative design project whose scope is to afford better communication between medical professionals and those affected by cancer in treatment pathways, clinical research settings and personal life.

It is a democratic platform aimed for the year 2030 where users can create and vote on visual symbols that describe cancer symptoms. Voting is done in an electoral system as each global region holds a percentage of influence based on users and population, preserving a universal perspective.

Selected symbols are catered towards wide audiences, regardless of knowledge level or spoken language. Living Language creates an intuitive method to describe the condition, available to most. Being an international dialect, it can be used across all fields of medical practice- capturing data in its purest state, without the need for translation. Developed with the help of medical industry experts, the project represents a vignette into how cancer care might develop within the next decade.

 

 

Living Language: News Segment

Speculative news segment from 2030 previewing service performance.

Platform Preview

User interacting with voting feature in prototype.

Development Work

Demo of Language Interface and Experience.

Research

Created as a language outsourcing platform, dictating the Living Languages symbols is left to its users. However, in order to confer the most accessible experience for its creators I researched existing visual languages extensively.

Storyboard

A pathway of learning and practicing visual language in medical care.