Plot Twisters
Founder and managing director of an EdTech design collective creating self-reflection tools
Plot Twisters is a design collective of designers, researchers, artists, and technologists passionate about creating playful tools to help us to better understand personal narratives and build our journeys toward wellbeing.
I founded the part-time volunteer organization in 2019 and have grown it to a core team of eight, with strategic collaborators helping along the way. I serve as the managing director of the collective but am heavily hands-on, leading the creation of the brand, concept artwork, digital prototypes, and written communications.
Since 2020, we have been creating our flagship product, Twisterland. An immersive online game for nurturing emotional literacy, personal narrative building, and self-advocacy skills in young people, Twisterland will help players learn to compassionately self-regulate and critically contribute to their communities in consensual, strengths-based ways.
Metrics & Impact
8 core members
16 occasional contributors, all involved in a part-time and voluntary basis
10 Partnerships
Georgia State University, Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, Sesame Workshop, and more
13 Workshops
Online and in-person playtests, focus groups, and presentations in USA and UK
Featured Plot Twisters Subprojects
Role Breakdown
I conceived Plot Twisters in 2019 for my undergraduate capstone at the USC Iovine and Young Academy. I developed the idea over the first year individually, visiting local middle and high schools and youth organizations in Los Angeles to test worksheet prototypes and conduct market research.
During years 1–2, I gathered a team of 8 team members from diverse walks of life who all experienced this problem firsthand as non-binary people or women of color with diverse neurotypes. Together, we spent these years reading and collating insights from literature in the humanities, social sciences, and educational leadership, narrowing down our design principles and aims with our flagship product, Twisterland. We also experimented with diverse creative and design projects: Storytelling Cards, concept art, and competitive research on “tools for thought” interfaces.
In years 2–4, I spearheaded business development by initiating partnerships with psychology labs (e.g. The EMPOWER Lab) and civic organizations (e.g. The Honest Majority) through mutually beneficial design projects. I also led our team to partake in residencies (e.g. DISI), fellowships (e.g. MEDLab), and presentations (e.g. Oxford University, Cambridge University, UN Internet Governance Forum) to fill research and development gaps. This period validated the need for our design collective and product vision, culminating in our team winning the $50,000 IDEO grant.
With the grant money, I took it upon myself to reorganize our collective via an official organizational charter and governance rules, a project long in the making but officialized in May 2023. Since then, I have returned to focusing on game design and development within our team. We collaborate in teams of 3–4 to flesh out Twisterland’s core mechanics, interactive game loop, and language processing algorithm.