Yuliya Parshina-Kottas

As a Graphics and Multimedia Editor for the New York Times graphics department, I use motion and interaction design to help readers understand current events in a new way. Collaborating with designers, developers, fellow animators, and writers, I become a temporary expert on diverse subjects and use 2d/3d software to visualize them in a clear, simple, and engaging manner.

You can see a current list of my contributions here.

Under the guidance of the WCS team, I designed and animated a simple user interaction for an upcoming conservation website. This video is intended as promotional material to raising funds, awareness, and interest for the project.

Read about the project on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Digital Underground blog.

Created for my Spring 2014 internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's MediaLab, the Accessible Wayfinder is a tool that helps visitors craft custom paths through the museum, based on their individual interests and environmental preferences. With the generous help of the MediaLab staff, fellow interns, and advisors from various Met departments, I built a back-end framework for calculating and outputting the best navigational path based on user input, which will drive future explorations of user experience, interface, and storytelling.

Following the agile development approach, the project was built in three stages using Javascrand (JQuery, RaphaelJS), and implemented a combination of the Dijkstra and Nearest Neighbor (TSP) algorithms. While it is not currently live on the web, I'd be happy to show it in person!

You can find the code on github: https://github.com/metmuseum-medialab/pathfinder

As a coding and interaction design intern at Potion Design, I worked under the guidance of the lead web developer and interaction designer to create an animated intro for the Bell Labs / Alcatel-Lucent website — G.W.A.T.T. 

HTML5 Canvas, CSS, Javascript (JQuery, EaselJS, TweenJS)

As the lead motion graphic artist with Ralph Appelbaum Associates Media Team, I designed, animated, and art-directed graphic content for six large-scale video exhibits at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, opened in November 2012 in Moscow, Russia. 

Working with a team of filmmakers, I translated their edits into the final projection-scale formats, created designs and storyboards, conducted motion, scale, and compression tests, and guided additional animators in the final production stages.

The Great Patriotic War film was one of three pieces featured on the 100' x 10' wall. I storyboarded three and animated two of the films. 

The Soviet Union vertical screens feature playful graphic interstitials interspersed between films depicting different aspects of Soviet life. I created storyboards and motion tests for the interstitials and art-directed the animation.

The Cities and Beyond exhibit depicts the transition of Jews from shtetls to cities in the pre-Soviet Russia. I storyboarded, created motion tests, animated the rough draft, and oversaw the final production of the piece.

As part of Local Project's creative team, I animated six out of eighteen films for this Hall of Fame exhibit, featured in the National Museum of American Jewish History lobby (Philadelphia, PA). Other responsibilities on the project included conducting motion and scale tests.

As part of the AMNH Exhibit Department team, I designed and animated 2D graphical and typographical overlays on the projection component of this Muse Award-winning interactive for the American Museum of Natural History's Horse exhibit (now traveling internationally).

The project involved visualizing the vision and hearing abilities of horses based on scientific research, creating seamless loops of the horse video that react to user interactions, and conducting scale, motion, and color tests.

Where Animals Live is a portable exhibit that gets kids ages 4 to 7 excited about geography and wildlife, through physical exploration of a giant world map. It is a roaming experience that pops up in parks, playgrounds, museums, classrooms, block parties, malls, and any community space that invites it for a visit.

Participants explore a 20 ' x 12 ' world map and use clues to help lost animals return home, while becoming familiar with continents, oceans, and habitats. Electronics embedded in the animals provide real-time tactile and sound feedback when the creature is placed correctly. Young explorers walk away with collectable cards about their favorite animals, which can be used for deeper learning online.

An accompanying website prepares kids for the adventure through practice exercises and encourages deeper learning after the in-person activity.

The idea was inspired by the Hall of Biodiversity in the American Museum of Natural History. It draws on the principles of Embodied Learning and the Cognitive Load Theory, as well as conversations with parents and educators.

A smaller-scale (10' x 6'), non-electronic prototype is currently being play-tested with young animal enthusiasts. Highlight appearances include the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Prospect Park Zoo, and the Sneak 'Peak' festival at Staten Island's Freshkills Park.

I am a chronic nail-biter. I bite so hard that it hurts to wash dishes or pick up salty snacks. I tried numerous methods of quitting: bitter nail-polish, monitoring and disapproval by friends and family, etc. Nothing worked!

Inspired by BJ Fog’s Behavior Model, I decided to change my focus from a stopping behavior (not biting) to a doing behavior (growing the fingernails). Karen Pryor book, Don’t Shoot the Dog, influenced me to adopt a positive reinforcement tactic instead of punishment to achieve my re-framed goal.

FingerTales implements a rewards-based system to encourage nail-growth. By focusing on the progress of one finger, the system aims to establish the new behavior across all ten digits.

It uses storytelling as an incentive, by reinforcing the daily documentation of the nail with new stories and celebrating achieved goals with fun, animated videos.

Inspired by our experience in the Collective Storytelling class, Wajma Mohseni and I joined forces to work on an independent project of great personal meaning. 

My role on the project was to set up the Tuio/Reactivision technology (described below) and program the interaction in Processing.

Objects of Displacement began with stories Wajma collected from family members and friends who were forced to flee their homes in Afghanistan during several periods of conflict. By focusing the conversation around one meaningful object these individuals were able to bring with them, Wajma’s interviews revealed the complex issues of conflict, displacement, memory, culture, value, family, and the essence of home. We are now working to expand this collection of stories to include the voices of displaced individuals from all over the globe.

Stacking Stories was born out of our desire to give Objects of Displacement a physical dimension. We wanted our audiences to touch the personal treasures featured in the stories, while learning of their complicated past.

We chose projection on sand as our storytelling canvas to give the content malleability and texture, allowing visitors to shape the surface with their fingers. Stories are given weight and shape through the use of stones as a navigational interface. The challenge of balancing the stones conveys the tumult and uncertainty of the storytellers' circumstances.

The Experience

The experience begins with a box of patterned stones, representing one individual’s story. When a stone is placed on the sand, it triggers a line of the story to appear. As stones are stacked on top of one another, the story progresses, line by line until the object and the owner of the story are revealed.

The Technology

Stacking Stories uses a web-cam, placed above the table, to read the TUIO patterns laser-cut into the clay-molded stones. The patterns are interpreted by reacTIVision, which sends the pattern’s individual ID and x,y coordinates to a Processing sketch. Processing drives the visual display.