Timothy Kwan

Ghostwriter is an assisted journaling program that helps you explore yourself and your future in story. Using NLP and narrative structure, Ghostwriter contextually prompts you to write a story about yourself. We do this to help us understand ourselves better, confront our present, and decide our future more confidently.

Sprout is a mobile app designed to help parents keep track of their children’s developmental progress and celebrate their life. Sprout is based on Babysteps, a research project by Julie Kientz at the University of Washington. The purpose of this app is to create a quick, enjoyable method for parents and family members to become more aware of their child’s development.

A response to 8 weeks of design research interviews, Reflections is a mirrored smartwatch concept that naturally forms an association between self-reflection and greater self-worth for the purpose of combatting depression.

For the 2019 Microsoft Design Expo we were tasked with accomplishing Empathy at Scale. We determined that scaling empathy would mean that empathy is practiced on a daily basis, in situations both great and small. However our own feelings, perspectives, and biases can stand in the way of building that empathy. From these conclusions we created Ponder, a system that provides people a safe space to vent and reflect while also creatively considering others' perspectives. Using AI, Ponder analyzes your point of view by asking clarifying questions, then using discourse from online articles Ponder suggests alternative perspectives in the form of a story. Finally, Ponder provides a platform by which people can set empathetic goals to help them practice empathetic reaction.