01
Mapping as Understanding
Mapping is how I refuse to commit to a narrative too early.
Portfolio 2026
Every skill I have, I needed first.
I chase the problem, not the toolkit. I learned social science, theory and method, to take a structure apart and see why it holds together the way it does. I learned design, fabrication, visualization, methodology, to build something that could act on what I found. I learned AI and infrastructure because the problem in front of me needed it. None of it was the goal. The problem was.
Drop me into a problem outside my training, and I will go acquire whatever it takes to solve it: a research method, a fabrication process, an unfamiliar piece of software, a new part of the AI stack. I do not wait until I am already qualified to start.
Structural & Stakeholder Analysis
Digital Fabrication & Visualization
AI Tooling & Infrastructure
Full-Stack Prototyping
0Projects
0Method moves
02
Selected Work
The Incomplete Archive
->A century-old Teochew shrine still stands on Block 33, Sam Yan, its fourth-generation caretaker now facing a 122-million-baht civil-damages claim from the university's property arm. This archive names the pattern, in English, Chinese, and Thai, and lets you walk it five different ways.
View CaseMake a Wish
->Sixty strangers wrote down the most private thing they had. Aggregated, their wishes mapped the structural forces shaping their lives.
View CaseShadow Within
->Some structures are invisible because they happen inside a person. This installation turns one, dissociation, into a space you can stand inside.
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Tangle -> Holder
->In a fifteen-minute appointment, a patient can't hand over a life's worth of accumulated state. So I built a touchable object that hands over the pattern instead.
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Roll-Up
->A small teaching tool on the surface. Underneath, a claim about distributed, agent-mediated knowledge infrastructure, trademarked two years before the term caught up.
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Simultaneously
->A frame manufactures your impression of a city. Change the frame, and two cities can both be true at once, without judging each other.
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Liminal Grounds
->An institution that calls itself open had withdrawn its publicness through a turnstile and a security desk.
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Thermal Commons Interface
->An HVAC setpoint buried in a dashboard four people could see. I turned it into something the whole building could read and contest.
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New Orleans Pre-covery
->Capital funds emergency damage far more easily than pre-disaster preparedness. I rewrote post-disaster housing as pre-disaster infrastructure.
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Los Balcones
->Squeezed between oil rigs and rising tourism, I asked how tourism, conservation, and livelihoods could be organized together.
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03
How I Work
Why This Seam
After three years tracing habitus, my thesis landed on cleft habitus: the condition of being caught between two mutually untranslatable worlds, forced to hold two logics of action at once. It is structural, produced by capital, institutions, language, and access to information, then internalized as the pattern by which we react.
I refuse to romanticize this position. Bilingual advantage and cross-cultural vision give me not an advantage but constant friction, and friction is a force. I convert that dislocation into method rather than curing it.
What I Care About
Across contexts, I care about how occlusion becomes a problem, and how it becomes an entry point. Problems are never isolated. They are tangled causal chains under one structure. Pull one thread and the whole thing moves, so where do we start?
I believe restricted information flow is what constrains the thinking that could produce change. Information silos make a system's complexity available to only some. I can't erase the vast inequalities of institution, information, and resource, so I design interfaces that at least make them visible, contestable, and acknowledgeable.
Reveal: make hidden structure visible
My strength is to acquire the capacity to compose a solution, then step back and make the settling process itself observable: surface the institutional grammar, decompose a seemingly natural outcome into deliberate moves, hold any settlement accountable before and after it occurs.
Mediate: get opposing sides to the same table
Design tends to reach for representation. I avoid it, because it assumes the represented need someone to speak for them. In practice I find the opposite: the represented are never silent, their speech simply isn't on the channel that gets heard.
Translate: turn discussion into something you can act on
I wrap up evidence of how power relations and capital flows operate, translate it for different actors, especially those the operations act upon, and build interfaces usable for negotiation or protest. A tool can sharpen expression, or be the medium itself.
Six Repeatable Moves
#MapBeforeYouJudge#FormFollowsReader#PositionAsOutput#StandInsideToBreakSilo#InsightNotCliche#EvidenceWithoutDistortion
02
Most Appropriate Expression
Information is filtered, hierarchized, optimized for external readability.
03
Social Science Awareness
I treat my own position as dynamic, relational, and self-aware.
04
Perspective Shifting
I build mechanisms that force readers and participants to inhabit several perspectives at once.
05
Complex, Not Complicated
I compress the mess into a takeaway a smart, contextual, non-expert reader can follow.
06
Evidence Without Distortion
I select and phrase evidence in the least-distorting way that lets the reader keep their own judgment.
What This Method Permits
- Permission to say I don't know.
- Permission to show messy internal tooling and polished external artifact at once.
- Permission to hold a position, as long as it is explicitly acknowledged.
- Permission to stop at made discussable rather than reaching solved.
- Permission to treat emotion as essential information, once it becomes evidence a reader can read and act on.
Every project answers one question: what does this way of designing how problems are seen grow into, in one concrete context?
About / Contact / Resume
Yanqin (Yvette) Ge
I'm Yanqin (Yvette) Ge. I'm currently a Master in Design Studies candidate at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, in the Publics Domain track, after a First Class Honours degree in Education Studies at UCL.
Everything on this site came out of the same habit: find a real problem, then go learn whatever it takes to act on it. A research method, a fabrication process, Rhino, Claude Code, whatever the problem asks for next.
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