Hyphen America

Hyphen America was a pop-up event that I hosted in Union Square in March 2018, where more than 60 participants created personalized “Hyphen Viewers,” i.e. kaleidoscopes that visualized and celebrated users’ rich and diverse cultural backgrounds. I wanted to engage the public in a conversation about how as Americans, we are all immigrants. Watch video documentation of this campaign on https://vimeo.com/271154625

Manako Tamura is an experience designer who received her MFA in Products of Design from School of Visual Arts in 2018. Her design manifesto is to solve the pain point of fitting in, which is her way of saying design for inclusion. This ethos manifested in her MFA thesis, Hacking the Racial Binary, where she sought to subvert the process of cultural assimilation especially for Asian Americans through workshops, apps, services, industrial design, and experience design.