Pajaro’s Floods: A Living Archive reimagines climate storytelling by blending spatial data and personal narratives to examine the layered factors - current, historical, and environmental - surrounding flooding in California’s Pajaro Valley. Through LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, interviews, scientific and community archives, this interactive web project makes visible the human and systemic forces shaping the region. It centers the stories of immigrant and farmworker communities whose lives have long been influenced by the Pajaro River and its division along county lines. The collective map and toolkit invite continued contributions, creating a space for communal memory grounded in place and offering a template for future climate storytelling models.
Role As the Creative Director and UX Designer, I shaped the project's conceptual framework, oversaw the UX design, and ensured a cohesive narrative across visual, auditory, and interactive elements. I also managed a multidisciplinary team, led grant writing, and created the 3D models and environments that anchored the interactive experience.
Team Rowan Ings (Creative Director and Producer), DXR Zone (Rifke Sadleir - Development, Daniel Baragwanath - UI Design), Eugenia Renteria and Carlos Campos (Local Producer), Juanita Fonseca Duffo, Xavier Martinez, Eugenia Renteria, Yesica Guzman, Maria Rodriguez (Translation), Taylor Goss (Sound Design), Iris Fung (Illustration)
Background
In March 2023, waters breached the southern banks of the levees on the Pajaro River and caused severe flooding in the town of Pajaro, California. For this primarily agricultural community, it was yet another incident in a long history of flooding. This event brought to the forefront conversations about the continuing infrastructure, socioeconomic disparities, environmental and governance challenges stemming from the river and its role as a dividing line between Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.
Collateral used in community reach outs
Initiation and Funding
This project began as an independent collaboration between Rowan and I, blending my previous VR art and point cloud visualization work with her filmmaking background and connections to journalists covering the Pajaro floods. Together, we envisioned a living archive that would amplify current residents' stories and contextualize the floods within broader interconnected environmental and infrastructural issues, using spatial storytelling to illuminate the systemic and place-based dimensions of this climate event and situate it within key community landmarks. I played a key role in securing funding, including drafting grant proposals for the Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Magic Grant, and Rowan brought on board journalistic and storytelling advisors Geri Migielicz and Srdan Keca, with informal input from other mentors.
Conducting interviews at Pajaro Middle School and delving into the archives at Pajaro Valley Historical Association
Research
Our research process was in collaboration with the community in Pajaro and its neighboring sister town of Watsonville. I spearheaded initial site visits to Pajaro through connecting with local organizations like Regeneración Pajaro Valley. We worked with local producers and community leaders and created a call out document to gather additional community input. Our research involved:
Site Visits through local contacts to walk through flood-affected areas, engage businesses and residents, and build relationships within the community.
Community Interviews with residents to gather their stories of current and past flooding, conduct walkthroughs, and LiDAR scanning of affected spaces.
Archival Work sourcing personal and community archives of past flooding and communities that lived in the Pajaro Valley. Connecting with local scientists and universities to integrate scientific and geospatial satellite data for a rich repository of both qualitative and quantitative materials.
Outcomes from facilitated narrative ideation sessions and site architecture mapping
Project and Product Management
Once we had gathered a critical mass of research, I facilitated design sprints to explore narrative directions and visual strategies. I led the developer search, interviewed candidates, and drafted contract workflows for the external agency we ultimately hired. To bridge differences between their waterfall process and the agile approach the project needed, I negotiated an initial prototype scene, our riskiest and most experimental component, as a proof of concept before committing to the full design and development. I also scoped and prioritized development tasks, wrote and managed tickets, and handled QA testing to ensure functionality and quality.
Initial Concept and Design Approach
Low-fidelity wireframes of the flow for a scene in the contemporary section
After mapping the overall site experience and architecture, I created low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for each section. The central design concept was built around a metaphor of geological layering, to reflect the complex nature of the historical, environmental, and human factors in Pajaro’s flooding. Users could uncover successive interactive layers to explore deeper into the narrative:
Contemporary Layer: Stories from the most recent 2023 flooding event with location based personal archives, ambient sound, and narrative audio.
Historical Layer: Decades of archival media synthesized and mapped by events into main themes or cycles such waves of immigrant groups, the crops they grew, and the floods that impacted it all.
Environmental Layer: Following the river’s path through a soil-based perspective to look at the different interconnected ecologies and research being conducted there. The soil map was developed using Terra Forma’s framework, in collaboration with our illustrator.
The initial wireframes helped iterate on the narrative and interaction layouts based on feedback. The experience design of the site was crafted with fading point clouds and ambient audio to evoke memory, water, traces, and the temporal nature of place.
Asset Creation
Video recordings of prototype demos for developer handoff
I led the integration and processing of diverse data sources, personal archives, scientific datasets, GIS, LiDAR, and satellite imagery, to build the project's immersive visual landscape. This included:
Processing satellite, GIS, and LiDAR scanning data to generate accurate 3D models of Pajaro’s flood-impacted geography and create layered spatial scenes of important community landmarks.
Cleaning and curating personal archives and their audio-visual assets to align with specific locations in the narrative pathways and contribute to site-specific sensory experiences.
Working across Blender, Unity, and CloudCompare to develop a fixed camera path through scenes that balanced our narrative structure with moments of user-driven exploration.
Creating photogrammetry of specimen data and incorporating maps and datasets from interviewed scientists to support visual communication of complex environmental considerations
Key UX Features
The UX aimed to balance a multi-layered, immersive experience with accessibility for a multilingual, digitally diverse audience. A key challenge was preserving the project's abstract and metaphorical elements while ensuring the clarity and intuitiveness users needed to navigate and understand the narratives.
Map layer navigation on home page
The same underlying map view was used throughout each layer to maintain consistency and build spatial knowledge and awareness. The main page featured a strata-like icon, allowing users to jump between layers visually building upon a 3D point cloud map of Pajaro.
Contemporary layer with point cloud map
An area for filters allowed users to categorize assets from the Pajaro Valley Historical Association by the synthesized themes (people, crops, and flooding). A toggle between icon and image view offered visitors options between a minimal layout and one with richer visual information.
Historical layer with filters
The main interactions included clicking location icons and swiping to zoom forward within 3D spaces (present in both contemporary and environmental layers), designed to feel intuitive across desktop and mobile devices. Tooltips and subtle text provided onboarding and wayfinding without overwhelming users.
Contemporary and Environmental Layer 3D Interactions
The interface supported bilingual navigation (English and Spanish), with voiceovers for key sections in Mixteco (a primarily oral Indigenous language spoken by many farmworkers in the area).
Bilingual navigation and voiceovers
The participatory community map provided a space for visitors to contribute stories, images, or geolocated videos to add to collective memory for the place. A supporting toolkit included open instructions on flooding and mapping resources as a template for future adaptation or engagement.
Collective Map and Toolkit
Development and Implementation
I coordinated a multi-disciplinary team, including a creative agency (technologist and UI designer) in London, an illustrator, and additional team members in California, while based in Europe myself, to bring the project from concept to production. I wrote briefs, led design reviews, finalized Figma files for development, and navigated technical and cultural challenges to ensure accessibility, cohesion, and resonance with the target community. Key challenges included:
Managing cross-disciplinary collaboration (design, development, illustration, sound, translation), using Trello for internal coordination and Notion to track the development workflow.
Aligning different working styles, balancing my agile software experience with the creative tech/graphic design agency’s approach, and negotiating with external developers to deliver a prototype ahead of full-scale rollout.
Balancing desired interactions in the more immersive 3D contemporary and environmental layers with technical constraints related to memory, speed, and browser performance.
Exploring novel ways of synthesizing and presenting layered information e.g. developing the environmental section’s introductory map using Terra Carta’s soil framework
Prioritizing core features such as the participatory community map and narrative layering, while downscoping a VR component due to technical limitations and sensitivity to local tech access.
Dealing with shifting team responsibilities and priorities, such as Rowan downscoping community workshops and planned audio when coordination and development became difficult.
Testing and Iteration
Web and mobile views of introductory screens
I facilitated quick usability testing with six users across varying levels of experience in new media, flood management, and California’s local history. Feedback revealed a need for clearer signposting to guide first-time users, differing priorities on degrees of freedom within scenes, and better mobile optimization. In response, I revised the design to prioritize clarity while maintaining narrative depth. Key refinements included:
Quotes and Narratives: Translated and curated quotes for emotional resonance and narrative clarity, placing them at the beginning of scenes in both English and Spanish to provide context and convey the narrator’s perspective.
Navigation and Signposting: Provided interaction instructions and tooltips, surfaced site layers more clearly, and scaled back abstract elements to enhance usability and legibility across different user experience levels.
Interaction Design: Reduced degrees of freedom in scene turning to prevent disorientation. Introduced the ability to pause, scrub, and revisit scenes, accommodating different comprehension speeds.
Mobile Optimization: Refined layouts and interactions for mobile-first access, recognizing that most community users engaged via smartphones.
Impact and Future Direction
Launch day event and media coverage
Pajaro’s Floods: A Living Archive launched with a screening at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (SCMAH) and was featured in Santa Cruz Local. It coincides with a new levee project and agency aimed at fostering collaboration between Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. Future plans include discussions on adapting the Living Archive toolkit to other climate-impacted communities, developing the immersive element further, and presenting the project in academic and public contexts. The project was recently recognized as a Webby Honoree and presented at the By Design and by Disaster conference.
Landing page
personal Reflection
This project was a transformative experience that deepened my understanding of climate storytelling and independent creative leadership. It was a mammoth undertaking - I juggled multiple roles and bridged communication hurdles on the fly. As co-director, I navigated the complexities of managing a cross-disciplinary, remote team without the support of corporate infrastructure, dealing with development timeline that dragged on and personal and familial challenges. I learned how to manage cross-cultural and cross-functional communication issues, negotiate and manage external vendors (including difficult ones), and work closely with local communities and a wide range of stakeholders. Developing a novel, few-of-its-kind project with no pre-existing distribution pathway pushed us to explore new avenues for launch and long-term impact, some of which are still unfolding. These experiences have shaped how I think about refining strategies for collaborating with underrepresented communities. Moving forward, I aim to build on these lessons to develop projects that bridge design, technology, and policy, particularly in the context of climate and environmental systems.
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