Hello! I am Yajur Sood, a UX designer by training and a creative technologist by passion. Welcome to my corner of the internet where I proudly display my professional work as well as my artistic creations.
“I don’t just want to leave a mark. I want to leave a me-shaped crater on the face of Earth.”
5-Minute Portfolio for People in a Hurry
Many people who visit a portfolio website do not have time to look through the entire website because of their busy schedule. I understand that, and to help such visitors, I have created a short video summary of my portfolio in video. It’s only 5 minutes long!
I created this portfolio video using Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing, the Windows Game Bar for screen recording and Soundstripe (the song’s name is “Reflections”, by Ghost Beatz) for background music.
I hope this condensed version of my portfolio suffices for those in a hurry. Meanwhile for the ones with time on their hands, I hope it encourages you to look through my portfolio in more detail!
My Works
Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition
ARCC is an NGO that focuses on combatting systemic racism and conducts various events, releases various forms of content and reaches out to the public through their website to spread awareness about issues of race and identity and to teach people how to move forward in their anti-racism journey.
ARCC states its mission as :
Our mission is to provide inspiration, education, and support for you to practice and spread anti-racism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of true education.”
I work at ARCC as a web UX design intern, managing their WordPress website and making regular User Experience and User Interface changes to make the website more user-friendly.
Earth Operation Center
The Earth Operation Center is a Virtual Reality project. Our team at Meteor Studio started out with an aim to develop a collaborative tool for research and education on climate change and its lasting effects. Later on, an unforeseen, but welcome, collaboration with Dreamscape on ASU’s campus led to some conceptual changes and the project was absorbed into the Dreamscape program with a new aim which was to develop it as a collaborative classroom experience for ASU students.
The fundamental elements of the project remained almost unchanged, but the interactions and the storyboard changed significantly to allow for the new use case.
I worked on this project as a Creative XR Developer. My main role was to focus on user interactions in VR and creating a cohesive experience that provided an optimum level of immersion.
Graphviz
As the name suggests, the project is a graph visualizer but with the added twist of being a virtual reality experience. I joined the Graphviz team at Meteor Studio when they brought the Graphviz project to Dreamscape as a classroom learning experience for mathematics students, specifically for any mathematical concepts involving graphs. The Graphviz team needed someone to design the User Interface for a web portal that will be used by professors to upload teaching content to the virtual space ahead of time. I accepted the responsibility and mainly worked in Figma to create the web portal.
The talented developers at Graphviz developed the web portal. While this task progressed, the project deadline shifted suddenly and Graphviz fell in need for more Unity developers. So, me and a new recruit joined the Unity Development team. I fixed some old design issues, and created new user interfaces as per the requirements for a new set of interactions for the professor. We were able to complete the project in time, and we presented it to the stakeholders and received a positive response.
On The Ethics of Tech
“On the Ethics of Tech” is my brainchild. I spent several past years of my life dreaming and subsequently planning to start this project of mine. My ideal plan was to start a YouTube channel but the opportunities to do that were scarce. I still pan on making it to YouTube but I have accepted that the progress will be gradual. Currently, I am the proud owner of a website that is a constant work in progress. I try to be regular with my blogs, but I am fine with sacrificing the regularity for quality.
This project is a blend of many disciplines - Art, Design, Writing, Technology and Philosophy. Although the main focus currently are the blog articles, I plan to have a gallery of standalone artworks. The website is always under development, and I will constantly post new blog articles. I have an Instagram page dedicated to this project as well and will soon be publishing podcasts with long-format videos being the next step down the line.
