Dana Elkis


Senior Designer, 2020 - Current
DSI - Design System International

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ITP, NYU Research Fellow, 
Design specialist, 2020-2022
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Fresh grad of 2020 by AIGA, NY



Creative Block 


Role Designer
For Bezalel - Speculative Design Studio 
Date January 2015 
Type Installation

Award Israel Design Award, 2015 Category: Interactive Design
The technological experience today is a dictated one. It is dictated by manufacturers who manufacture technologies which aim to solve very specifically-defined problems, those that can be phrased concisely and quickly. Ideally, the entire experience should be expected; to enable affordance, so that the user – that concealed, anonymous being – will not stop a moment to think; to abolish any difficulty, in hope of maximum benefit and efficacious manufacturing. In my project, I challenge the dictated utilitarianism in the world of applications, where everyone uses existing platforms, and I try to build a new platform which claims ownership of the entire technology.

In search of a new sensory, game-like experience, in search of immersiveness which does not demand a give/take relationship, I took the "I-Ching", the early Chinese text, and combined it with a textual suggestion engine that "learns" the user (through the correction and writing suggestion application Swiftkey) and provides various suggestions for completion of the sentence.

This establishes a game-like experience which aims to open creative blockages, to direct the user to new internal attentiveness and communication with humor and game. The interface is comprised of box-shaped adjacent flakes of letters, which open with a gesture of acceptance from the user. The particles move and shape phrases to be examined and approved by the user. The interface allows new possibilities for new self-concept and challenges the existing world of technology, which stopped dreaming a new science fiction and just replicates old ideas of man-machine communications.

Go to > Project Website