Julia Chatain

Senior Scientist at the Singapore-ETH Centre, building the Future Embodied Learning Technologies (FELT) programme, and interested in math education, HCI, XR, AI, and embodiment.

Design

Dec 2024

As a hobby, I enjoy drawing and designing for various projects. On this page, I would like to show some of my favourite contributions.

The Diverter

For my blog on education, The Diverter, I wanted a drawing style that is abstract enough to quickly convey a meaning, but also remains expressive. Here are some examples of illustrations for the blog. The abstract painting integrated in the bottom left corner is by artist Maja Malmcrona.

a series of stick figures in black, grey, and purple

AyeAyeKitty visual identity

As my friend opened an Instagram account to stop misinformation about blind cats, AyeAyeKitty, she asked me to do the visual identity for her page. Inspired by her cats and her online content, I made a logo, a highlight header, and a sticker sheet.

a cat head with a pirate eye patch, and a pink tongue out. The head is drawn in a semi-realistic style and combines the three cats of the account three cartoonish cats, sleeping on each other, forming a circle a sheet of stickers in a cartoonish style

CHIldren are welcome at CHI!

For the CHI conference in 2023, I was invited to design stickers to show which demos are accessible to children. My idea was to reuse the boat logo of the conference, but make it as perceived by a child, using digital versions of papercuts or crayons.

a series of 8 stickers, with paper cutouts of boat in primary colors, or crayon-drawn boats including 4 children of diverse genders and skin colors

Voices of SIGCHI

As a volunteer in the Communications Committee of SIGCHI, I made some suggestions for the cover of "Voices of SIGCHI". For the "circles" design, I was inspired by the UI for voice calls in Telegram, with the animated circle. For the soundwave, I used an audio recording of the phrase "Voices of SIGCHI".

6 designs with text Voices of SIGCHI, 2 show a set of various mis-aligned circles around the SIGCHI logo, 4 show a soundwave either full white, full orange, or represented with vertical lines

Post Adventures

For one of our projects at the Game Technology Center, together with Dominic Weibel, we co-designed an educational game with girls. I created the 2D graphics for this game, including the content of the back pack, inspired by what girls and women in my life have in their own bags. The flag patch on the backpack can be clicked to change the language of the game. All 3D content was created by Dominic.

2 UIs, one shows a blackboard with a list of letters and packages to deliver, as well as a clock and a backpack, the other shows a 3D map with a post-person delivering the mail. All the UI is drawn in cartoon style and bright colors. Besides the mail, the backpack includes a water bottle, a tamagochi, and a bag a tampons.

Lambda buffers

For the Lambda buffers project, I wanted to play with the idea of an interface, translating information from one schema to another. To do this, I played with squared and roundy shapes in the text, as well as the colors with a subtle change from blue to purple.

two intricated lambdas with the text Lambda Buffers next to it, the words one above the other. The outside of the words use curved shapes when the inside use square and angular shapes

Co-design process

In most of my research, I follow a co-design process, so I designed a visual to describe this process. It shows the involvment of three stakeholders: teacher (purple), student (blue), and researcher (red) building a learning machine.

a process of 7 steps: contact point, idea generation, prototyping with iterative testing, content development, implementation with iterative testing, evaluation, and publication. Each step is illustrated with bubble characters describing the stakeholders. Together they are assembling a learning machine, represented as a box with a screen showing a signal, two handles to grab it, and a funnel to sense information.