Nora Zhang is a digital product designer based in New York, with a specific focus on end-to-end UX/UI design. She has an MFA in Design & Technology from the Parsons School of Design. Her design principle is to use concise design to solve complicated problems. For her thesis project, she developed EDGE, a VR adventure game.
EDGE is a reflection on the omnipresence of privacy invasion in the digital era, coupled with a lack of regulations that scrutinize and constrain the entities who are stealing peoples’ privacy. Even though humans make every effort to protect their privacy, they still cannot avoid it being destroyed.
In Nora’s words, “I often dream that I go to public places or take public transportation naked. In my dream world, people are not to be surprised to see such a common sight, so I keep telling myself, ‘it’s nothing. It’s normal’. However, I’m still very nervous and uneasy in the dream, which always makes me wake up in a panic.”
As a response to this feeling, Nora built the EDGE VR experience. This dark and broken dreamlike environment reflects peoples’ increasingly uneasy and anxious inner worlds, while under the current mass surveillance state. To successfully complete the game, users need to move their bodies, calculate timing, solve a few puzzles, and more in order to escape from the line of sight of the surveillance state’s ubiquitous eyes.