When the temperature feels off,
know you have options.
Most students who could use CMU’s Title IX office never reach out,
often because they aren’t sure what happened, or whether it counts.
Heat became the language for that uncertainty, and an Option key
became something you could take with you.
Equity and Title IX
fabricator and developer
laser cutter, Vercel
Impact
80+Option keys taken off the wall
300+unique visitors to the site
400+page views in the first week
Installation
Heat stands in for uncertainty: hot where things feel unclear, cooling as they settle. Thirty-six hand-painted Option keys build one heat map, each one an option you can take with you.
Behind every key, a QR code to the resources.
It leads to knowyouroptions.site. Scan, feel, scroll, find your option, without having to explain what happened first.
The same heat carried onto posters across campus, each with a QR code to the site.
System
Certainty exists on a spectrum. The visual system moves from hot (uncertain) to cool (certain), while reinforcing that support can begin anywhere along it. Blurred heat holds what is still unresolved; sharp, ringed forms hold what is clear. The same rings, heat and type carry across the wall, the posters, the stickers and the site, so every piece reads as one temperature, and each one points to the same place to start.
- Dangerous
- Messy
- Confusion
- Certainty
- Clarity
- Calmness
Image treatment
Provocative imagery is intentionally made ambiguous through cropping, obscuring, and heatmap treatment, evoking a feeling without prescribing what happened.
Process
Client review
Blurred against sharp heat
Breaking heat into pieces
Tools I built
Small browser tools for the tedious parts, so the time went to design decisions instead.
Heat Maker
Type, photos or blobs into thermal heat
Ripple Maker
Shapes wrapped in rings of colour
Grid Cutter
One image into a grid of square pieces
Reflection
This project reminded me how much I love designing through making. The concept only really came together because I kept experimenting, following weird connections, and letting one idea lead to another. Going from a messy Figma file to a physical installation and digital experience in such a short amount of time was exhausting, but incredibly rewarding. More than anything, seeing people actually stop, interact, and take pieces with them reminded me that design can become much more meaningful once it leaves your screen and enters someone else’s life.