Calvin Iwata Memoji, smilingCalvin Iwata Memoji, celebrating with confetti
ProductGraduate school

UC Berkeley

Two years at Berkeley: a stress-sensing wearable, a type study, and an alphabet built out of a tangerine.

The Unifocal wearable visor beside its companion iPhone app, which shows a descending heart-rate trace on a blue field

The problem

A wearable that reports your stress level has a legibility problem before it has a UI problem. It sits on your face, the one place you can’t look.

So the question for the UI aesthetics course wasn’t what the app should look like. It was how one instrument reads across two surfaces when the wearer never sees one of them.

What I did

I sketched the device first and gave each part a job. The honeycomb pattern carries stress intensity, the bars across the visor are the wearer’s heart rate, and clear glass means relaxed.

Hand-drawn front, back, left and right views of the Unifocal visor, annotated to show that the pattern indicates stress intensity and the clear glass indicates a relaxed state
Four views, annotated with what each surface is saying. The pattern and the heart-rate bars were decided here, before either reached a screen.

That settled the app. Stressed runs warm and patterned, with a rising trace. Relaxed goes blue, drops the pattern, and the trace descends.

Whoever is looking at you reads the visor. You read the phone. Same two variables, two audiences.

The stressed and relaxed states side by side, each pairing a colored visor with a phone screen showing a rising or falling heart-rate trace
Both states, device and screen together. Color, pattern and trace direction move as one, so the state is legible even with the device off your face.
A typography specimen for Unifocal showing Roobert Bold and Regular at heading, subheading, body and button sizes, with three button states
The type and button scale, at 64, 32, 20 and 16 points.

A separate typography course produced the opposite kind of work: a full lowercase alphabet built from one tangerine and some salad leaves, arranged by hand under a ring light and shot from above.

A complete lowercase alphabet from a to z, each letter formed from tangerine segments, peel and green leaves, photographed on black
Twenty-six letters, one tangerine. Segments make the bowls and peel makes the stems.
The overhead shooting setup: a ring light over tracing paper, with tangerine segments and leaves arranged and waiting
The rig. Tracing paper, a ring light, and a lot of discarded segments.

Outcome

The degree was an M.S. in Information Management, August 2021 to May 2023.

The capstone was MYND, which won the Dr. James R. Chen Award. Fyle came out of the venture course and took first place. Zeniversity and the Oregon DMV redesign have their own pages.

In January 2022 I returned as a Graduate Student Instructor, and spent three semesters teaching design research, prototyping and critique.

That’s the part of this page I’d defend first, and it’s why mentorship has its own page.

More work

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