01
Mapping as Understanding
Mapping is how I refuse to commit to a narrative too early.
Hi, I'm Yvette.
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 Bachelor degree at UCL.
Beside that, I am
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 AnalysisTaking a mess of scattered detail, interviews, documents, incentives, timelines, and composing it into one picture where you can see who moves whom, and where a decision would actually land.
Digital Fabrication & VisualizationGetting hands dirty early. A rough prototype or MVP in front of people beats a finished argument, because the making and the critique iterate on each other. Figma, Adobe CC, InDesign, Rhino, Grasshopper, Blender, Cursor.
AI Tooling & InfrastructureBuilding with models rather than around them: agent pipelines, multi-turn context, tool calls, retrieval, and the data structures underneath. Claude Code, Codex, VLMs, and the plumbing that makes them hold.
Full-Stack PrototypingCarrying an idea from sketch to a live URL without handing it off. Front end, data layer, deploy. Vanilla JS and CSS, Cloudflare Workers and Pages, Supabase, Firebase, Framer, Webflow, Vercel.
Ambiguity to StructureHolding an undefined problem long enough for its shape to appear, then turning it into maps, criteria, workflows and staged decisions people can actually work from.
Cross-Disciplinary TranslationCarrying one argument between social science, design and engineering, and keeping it true in each language. What counts as evidence changes at every border.
Adoption & Organizational ChangeDesigning for the people who have to act on it, not only the people who use it. What gets adopted depends on incentives, existing workflow and who has to defend the decision.
Know more about me Download CV
Contact me at yvette_ge@gsd.harvard.edu yanqin.ge@outlook.com LinkedIn WeChat: yvt_to_come +1 617 680 8178 +86 138 1769 4948
01
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 Case
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.
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.
View CaseRoll-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.
View Case
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.
View Case
Liminal Grounds
->An institution that calls itself open had withdrawn its publicness through a turnstile and a security desk.
View CaseThermal 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.
View Case
New Orleans Pre-covery
->Capital funds emergency damage far more easily than pre-disaster preparedness. I rewrote post-disaster housing as pre-disaster infrastructure.
View Case
Los Balcones
->Squeezed between oil rigs and rising tourism, I asked how tourism, conservation, and livelihoods could be organized together.
View Case
02
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?
03
Academic Writing
Social science is what keeps me alert: to the world, to the structures inside it, to the problems those structures produce. Seven papers from the UCL years, and what I want on top of them is speed. To see clearly, then move quickly, and enjoy the moving.
00Mapping the JourneyHabitus and capitals in Chinese international students' cultural fit. The cleft-habitus research the rest of this site runs on. Read it and the vocabulary in How I Work stops sounding like metaphor.Sociology of education, research design, cross-cultural and comparative studyDissertation · UCL Institute of Education · 202415,234w
01Thinking with FeminismsGender studies, anthropology, autoethnographyEssay · +extras2,224w
02Communicating KnowledgeScience communication, public engagement, media productionReflective essay · +extras2,500w
03Heroine Films and the Male GazeFilm and media studies, feminist theory, representationEssay1,680w
04Who Can Afford CultureQuantitative sociology, cultural economics, secondary data analysisQuantitative essay2,207w
05The School Uniform SkirtSociology of the body, East Asian studies, policy critiqueEssay3,224w
06New Literacies and ProductionMedia literacy, pedagogy, practice-based researchReflective essay · +film2,674w