Client
Role
Industry
Year
Unity, Blender, Adobe Audition, Photogrammetry tools, Oculus Quest, Notion
Tools
Partition is remembered in numbers. Fourteen million displaced. Hundreds of thousands killed. Borders drawn in six weeks. What the numbers don't hold are the keys kept for houses that no longer exist, the shawls folded into suitcases that crossed in both directions, the photographs that became the only record of people left behind.
What She Carried begins there — with objects. Through in-depth interviews with families across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, I gathered personal histories tied to everyday things that survived the 1947 Partition of British India: carried, hidden, inherited, and quietly passed on. Participants were treated as collaborators throughout — involved in how their stories would be held and shared, with consent and care at the centre of every research decision.
Those objects and voices became the material for a VR experience built in Unity, using photogrammetry to bring physical artifacts into immersive 3D space. The environments are deliberately neither realistic nor abstract — rooms that feel both grounded and suspended, where objects float in symbolic space and ask to be looked at rather than interacted with. This is not a reenactment. It is an invitation to witness.
Sound does as much work as space. Spatial audio layers ambient soundscapes with interview excerpts — not just what is remembered, but how it is remembered: the pauses, the corrections, the things that still don't have words. Guided by trauma-informed design principles throughout, the experience honours fragmentation and silence rather than resolving them. Some stories remain incomplete. Some wounds resist narration. The design makes room for both.
Using Unity and photogrammetry, I designed environments that feel both surreal and grounded, where these personal artifacts float in symbolic space. Users move slowly through rooms that each tell a unique story, encouraging moments of pause, presence, and reflection. To keep the experience focused, photorealistic textures were combined with minimalist design elements, allowing the emotional weight of the objects to remain central. This is not a puzzle or reenactment, but an invitation to witness and feel.
Phase 3: Sound, Embodiment & Trauma-Informed Design
To enhance the sense of presence, I layered spatial audio with ambient soundscapes and carefully chosen excerpts from the interviews. Each voice shares not only what is remembered but also how it is remembered. Sound serves as a bridge between physical space and emotional depth. Guided by trauma-informed design principles, the experience avoids graphic reenactments. Instead, it embraces fragmentation, silence, and absence, recognizing that some stories remain incomplete and some wounds resist narration. This thoughtful approach encourages reflection without retraumatization, allowing users to engage with memory in a respectful and meaningful way.
What She Carried serves as both a digital memorial and a speculative archive, honoring the small, emotional truths that are often missing from official histories. It highlights the power of participatory design—not just to share stories, but to create spaces where collective memory is held with care. For me, this project was a meaningful lesson in designing with empathy, cultural sensitivity, and deep intention. It’s about creating technology that doesn’t aim to impress but to remember.
What She Carried functions as a digital memorial and speculative archive — a space where the emotional residues of a history too large to hold can be encountered at the scale of a single object, a single voice, a single room. It was exhibited as part of my NYU ITP thesis and represents the fullest expression of my practice: research, technology, and design in service of something that matters.
It also stands as a reminder that the most powerful thing a designer can do is sometimes simply make space — for memory, for absence, for what couldn't be brought across but wasn't forgotten either.
