My Linh Le

UX Designer
Hello, I’m Linh Le.
I’m a User Experience and Visual Designer with 4 years of experience helping businesses create engaging, user-centered products for their audience. I have worked both in teams and individually, doing user interviews, usability testing, sketching, wireframing, user flows and visual design. I love problem solving and studying human behaviors.
Hello, I’m Linh Le.
I’m a User Experience and Visual Designer with 4 years of experience helping businesses create engaging, user-centered products for their audience. I have worked both in teams and individually, doing user interviews, usability testing, sketching, wireframing, user flows and visual design. I love problem solving and studying human behaviors.
Thesis Faculty
Clareese Hill,Barbara Morris,Clarinda Mac Low,Barbara Morris

The Seance

Project Website

Concept Statement 

The Séance is a walking simulator that combines speculative storytelling with gamification to tell the hidden stories of Vietnamese women’s experience with intergenerational trauma caused by wars, violence, and social upheaval in Vietnam in the 20th century. Users are invited to play the role of a Vietnamese person in a distant future who found the digitized consciousness of one of their ancestors in a machine with all their memories and buried family secrets.

By telling the stories of women in my own family, I hope to help myself and young Vietnamese people of my generation understand the lived experience of our foremothers in a more empathetic way.

By experimenting with speculative storytelling, I also want the audience to think about the legacy that could be lost to time as women continue to be left outside of the archive, and their voices are silenced.

Screenshot from the prototype
Screenshot from the prototype

Historical and cultural context

  • A lot of the stories of women who lived through the Indochina War and Vietnam War were not recorded in history textbooks in Vietnam.
  • Stories of women who lived through wars survived in the stories that they tell their children and grandchildren. 
  • Those stories need to be preserved and told to future generations, or they will be lost to time.
  • Hau Dong, a spirit summoning ritual in the worshipping of mother goddesses, is a way to communicate with deities, the spirits of ancestors.
  • It is often used by families to look for people who died far away from home.
  • There is no religious text. The tradition is preserved through songs and dance.
Screenshot from the prototype
Screenshot from the prototype

Download

https://mlinhle617.itch.io/the-seance