LIEN TRAN // INTERACTION DESIGNER

I am a designer living in New York City where I am pursuing a MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. My design work centers around humanitarian and participatory design and includes games, physical interactions, design advocacy, and web- and print-based information design. I invite you to view my design work.

I previously studied graphic design at Parsons and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor in Business Administration in Information Technology and a minor in Computer Science from The College of William and Mary. I'm also a member of dataPlayed, a collective of game designers based in New York.

My professional work experience ranges from corporate consulting, including government and commercial clients, to non-profit grassroots teaching and higher education administration in the United States and abroad. I have also done lots of freelance graphic and web design including design work for large and small NGOs. In 2010 I spent the summer in Nairobi, Kenya, creating advocacy tools for an HIV/AIDS legal aid NGO through an Open Society Foundations Fellowship in Information Design. During 2010-11 I collaborated with a team to design Magnitude - a conference game about development and disaster risk management - for U.N. Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR)'s Global Launch of the 2011 Global Assessment Report (GAR).

At Parsons I was a founding member and President of dorkShop, a student organization responsible for organizing and running student- and alumni-taught workshops open and free to the public with topics ranging from code, web programming, physical computing, and time-based software. I've recently joined PETLab's Activate! project and taught game design through environmental topics in Abu Dhabi in July 2011.



If you are interested in hiring me for freelance design/web/technology projects please email me.
(CV available upon request.)

My technical skills include:
- Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla CMS customizations
- HTML5, CSS3, XML, PHP, MySQL
- C++ and openFrameworks
- Proce55ing
- Arduino
- Adobe CS5: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop
- Apple Final Cut Pro
- MS Office including MS Access
- Banner and Brio (Sungard Higher Education)

United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) partnered with Parsons to design advocacy tools for the upcoming launch of their biannual Global Assessment Report (GAR 11).

Magnitude is a conference board game where groups of four collaboratively play as a nation to achieve the most progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals* (MDGs). A nation's investments and MDG progress are at risk of destruction unless disaster risk management (DRM) measures are taken. Magnitude debuted at the GAR 11’s launch in Geneva, Switzerland, in May 2011.

* Nations pledged to achieve the eight Millennium Devleopment Goals by 2015. In September 2010, the world recommitted itself to accelerate progress towards these goals. In Magnitude, it is the players’ collective goal to achieve this same pledge.

Game designed by Lien Tran, Ben Norskov, and Michelle Jackson.
Parsons Humanitarian Design Lab, UNISDR Collaboration Studio, Fall 2010.

Magnitude on the GAR11 website

Stakehold'em was the official Games for Change 8 conference game. Form high scoring hands by networking with other conference attendees. Cards based on roles of a successful serious game design team.

Game designed by Karen Sideman, Oylum Boran, Mohini Dutta, Eulani Labay, Lien Tran and Roussina Valkova.

G4C and Stakehold'em (Gamasutra)

Created website including logo animation for children's storytelling business.

Created using Wordpress, HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery.
Freelance project, June 2011.

AIDS Law Project is a legal-based NGO based in Nairobi, Kenya, advocating the human and legal rights of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) in Kenya and throughout East Africa.

As a design fellow, I spent 8 weeks working with ALP in Nairobi, Kenya, creating new branding and print design including a new logo, pamphlet and newsletter templates, business cards, and the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Act booklet (simplified version, 2010 Kenya). I also designed a poster which was on display at the AIDS 2010 conference in Vienna, Austria.

Also as part of the fellowship I designed, developed, and launched a Drupal CMS website for ALP to share their legal information and news with partners and benefactors: www.aidslawproject.org

The website was designed around key issues for easy access to relevant information and to be lightweight since the target audience lives in East Africa with slow and sometimes costly (charged per MB downloaded) internet access.

Fellowship in Information Design, Open Society Foundations, Public Health Programs,
Nairobi, Kenya, Summer 2010.

Kalachakra is a platform game based on the Tibetan mandala of the same name. This game was created during Global Game Jam 2011 where the theme was extinction. The goal of Kalachakra is to make your way up the 5 stages of the palace and achieve nirvana, the ultimate state of extinction.

Explore the palace and its challenges on Atmosphir. (Level design still under development.)

Collaboration between Lien Tran and Al Doyle, game created in Atmosphir.
Global Game Jam, New York, January 2011.