Sophia Collender
Design Engineer + Researcher
Hi, I'm a design engineer and researcher based in New York. I build accessible, user-centered digital products — from research and prototyping through to shipping the code. I care about making complex systems feel clear, and I work across the web, physical computing, and 3D fabrication to do it.
sophiacollender@icloud.com → deeper aboutWhat I'm Building
The Experimental Paint Archive
An online archive documenting how unconventional fine art materials are made from scratch — reused materials, biomaterials, earth pigments.
Read case study →AntiScroll
A personal feed of the day's arXiv and bioRxiv preprints, built to replace the doomscroll — a soft green/blue glow that deepens as you scroll, stimulating but calm.
Read case study →SquishyMusic
Designing an instrument with zero learning curve — pressure-based interaction across the whole surface, refined through hands-on usability testing. NYU Prototyping Fund ×2.
Read case study →Nemesis
A dating app, for the opposite reason — matching you with the person who will annoy you most. Grudges ranked, feuds declared, scores kept forever.
Read case study →Pulp Press
An online literary magazine built with a custom web experience for every piece it publishes.
Read case study →Harbor Forms
A packaging system designed so the material communicates its own end-of-life — grown from seaweed, zero synthetic inputs, closed-loop by design.
Read case study →Experiments
Approximate Cave Flood Simulator
A stylized visualization of real cave scans filling with simulated rainwater.
Read case study →Plant Guide
An interactive guide for identifying and caring for plants, built as a playful, exploratory reference tool.
Read case study →Simulacra
Photographs of real places that branch into networks of AI-generated copies, each further from the original, until the image resembles nowhere at all. Shown at the Flora Residency and Group Show, 2025.
Read case study →ORGANUM
A scroll-driven listening piece tracing how organum — polyphonic music born from a second voice added to Gregorian plainchant — transformed European church music.
Read case study →Doodle Round Up!
A meditative game — trace a slow circle around drifting shapes to gather them in. Nothing to lose here.
Read case study →Perceptron LLM
An interactive playground for watching how a language model actually picks its next word — one probability at a time.
Read case study →What is Rust?
A scroll-driven explainer on the chemistry of corrosion, paired with a real 3D-scanned rusted object you can drag and rotate.
Read case study →TyperSpeed
A typing experience where color shifts represent your velocity, answering short prompts against the clock.
Read case study →Exhibitions
New York Transit Museum: Sonification Division
Capacitive touch sensors made with copper adhesive, built into cubic maps of the subway in each borough. Each borough sounds a tone pitched to its own ridership, and touching them lets visitors compose together.
Read case study →Yale CCAM: Cartography Division
Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media — a cartography-focused installation mapping transportation systems.
Read case study →FLOHAUS Gallery: A Home Together
A group exhibition at FLOHAUS Gallery, New York — showing Look at Her (2025), a single-channel video.
Read case study →Littlefield: Cartography Division
Conductive-board cartography installation, independent venue presentation.
Read case study →Bobst: Rhetoric at Arms
Bobst Library — an installation involving smashed cement elements, part of The Public's Domain.
Read case study →The New York Horological Society: Escape Clause
The New York Horological Society — a time-based installation built around a pill-clock mechanism.
Read case study →Material Investigations
Slimesynthzer
An unconventional input surface — cinder block and conductive slime — designed to test how much unpredictability an interface can carry before users stop trusting it.
Read case study →Date Clock
A deliberately imprecise timepiece exploring what "good enough" information looks like, and how users build trust in an ambiguous interface over time.
Read case study →Slime Archive
Documenting the growth of Physarum polycephalum over time through a microscopic camera and sped-up footage.
Read case study →Bio-Based Electronics
Ongoing research into designing reliable feedback around organic, living components — the foundation behind Slimesynthzer and Date Clock.
Read case study →CAD Products
The rapid prototype-test-iterate practice behind every enclosure and mechanism in this portfolio, built in Fusion 360 and 3D printed at every stage.
Read case study →Writing
Typeface Information
Substack, ongoing — a daily blog of short entries, each explaining one thing about a typeface.
Read the blog →How Money Could Move Us
2025, Interledger Summit — research on payment interoperability among global mass transit systems.
Read the article →The Call for Papers Program
Interledger Foundation — a cohort initiative examining financial inclusion, open payments, and digital governance.
Read the article →Being Without Brains
Adjacent, Issue 12 — an essay on slime mold, artificial intelligence, and non-human spatial intelligence.
Read the article →