→ Overview: Multitasking
What happens when the systems we use to measure productivity cannot recognize the work that sustains everyday life?
Held at Once is a research-driven installation examining how motherhood reshapes experiences of time, labor, and value. Working across graphic design, data, typography, and speculative objects, I question the assumption that meaningful work must be measurable. The project draws from my lived experience of raising children while maintaining a professional design practice and pursuing my MFA.
→ Challenge: Making invisible labor visible
Contemporary systems of productivity tend to reward speed, efficiency, and measurable output. Care, presence, emotional attention, and domestic labor rarely fit within those frameworks.
The central challenge was to use the familiar language of measurement to expose its limitations.
How might graphic design reveal the value of experiences that cannot be reduced to numbers?
→ Research: The limits of measurement
I began by observing and documenting periods of overlapping responsibilities, recording daily activities during a time of intensive professional, academic, and maternal labor. Rather than treating this information as data for self-optimization, I approached it as evidence of the inadequacy of conventional productivity metrics.
I also explored visual systems associated with economic value and standardized time, asking what happens when their familiar structures are applied to forms of labor they were never designed to recognize.
→ Design Process: Reimagining systems of time
The installation unfolds across two spaces.
Space One — The language of value: A scrolling LED marquee borrows the visual language of a Wall Street financial ticker. Instead of displaying stock prices or market activity, it presents a sentence that resists being converted into measurable value. A daily activity log accompanies the marquee, revealing the density of overlapping responsibilities while questioning the idea that recording time can fully explain its meaning.
Space Two — A different model of time: A speculative hourglass with three throats proposes an alternative to linear time. Rather than moving through one continuous sequence, time splits, overlaps, and exists simultaneously across different responsibilities. The object is accompanied by a soft manifesto for working mothers, a text that resists urgency and reframes care, endurance, and attention as forms of strength.
→ Outcome: Making Invisible Labor Visible
Exhibited at Mason Gross Galleries in January 2026, Held at Once brought together graphic design, data visualization, typography, and sculptural objects in a physical installation.
By translating everyday experiences of care into visual and material forms, the project invited viewers to encounter the often-overlooked dimensions of maternal labor. The exhibition created a space for reflection, shifting the focus from measuring productivity to recognizing the complexity of work that often remains unseen.
→ Reflection: Design as Critical Inquiry
Held at Once deepened my understanding of graphic design as a form of critical inquiry, where visual systems are not simply tools for communicating information but also ways of questioning how that information is defined, measured, and valued.
Through this project, I explored how design can become a way of examining my own experiences while connecting them to broader social structures. It demonstrated how personal reflection can lead to critical questions, making overlooked experiences visible, challenging established systems of measurement, and creating space for more nuanced understandings of labor, care, and everyday life.
Exhibition
A Simultaneity Mark, January 20 – February 5, 2026, Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ
A Simultaneity Mark, January 20 – February 5, 2026, Mason Gross Galleries, New Brunswick, NJ