Woodland Echoes
In 2025, I was tasked with a project, which was to design a game, interactive book, or activity for young children. The constraint that interested me was that most children's digital experiences are loud — bright, busy, gamified. I wanted to design quiet. A digital bedtime book that does what physical bedtime books do: slow heart rates down, ritualize the end of the day, hand-off attention from screen to sleep
I drew on two reference points. Goodnight Moon — for the soothing repetition, the rhythm of saying goodnight to objects in a room, the way the palette darkens page by page. And Firewatch — for the atmospheric environmental color, the sense that the world quietly continues even when the foreground rests. The synthesis: a digital book where each spread is a quiet observation of nature, the palette desaturates as the book progresses, and the only interactions are gentle taps that complete a small detail rather than trigger a reward. I am working toward publishing my children's book, with the goal of bringing this bedtime story to young audiences.
