Experience
Designer
Designer
Hi, I'm Yulia an interdisciplinary designer, researcher and educator.
With a background in object and interaction design, I design participatory experiences that work through the body, physical engagement, and space.
With a background in object and interaction design, I design participatory experiences that work through the body, physical engagement, and space.
{Yulia Brazauskayte - Portfolio}
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(Russell L. Ackoff et.al)
“There is no better way to gain an understanding of something than by designing it”
- This approach is grounded in embodied cognition theory.
- Movement is the mechanism that carries the experience;
- I use bodily engagement to shape how people feel, relate, and make meaning;
2026
How I work
03/
I design with the body in mind
2026
My approaches
03/
- This approach necessitates to work across disciplinary boundaries.
- I use research to clarify the core of the experience before shaping its form.
- I design to make sense of something that is hard to grasp, then turn that understanding into a form people can experience.
2026
How I work
02/
I use design to make sense of complexity
2026
My approaches
02/
- In that world, my role is not to choreograph every response, but to create the conditions for participation to unfold.
- Design can reshape what feels possible, creating conditions where people encounter new ways of relating to themselves, others, and the world around them.
2026
How I work
01/
I see design as a world-shaping practice
2026
My approaches
01/
How I work
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[2025] ~ A site based experience
Ancestral Pilgrimage
A guided family discovery experience blending genealogical research and experience design into a deeply personal roots adventure for three adult siblings.
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[2025] ~ Experimental gathering
Inner Child
A play-based gathering for a small group of guests, designed as a dreamlike environment where adults could loosen everyday social habits and re-connect with childlike curiosity and wonder.
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[2022] ~ Dual-site interface
Undula
A research-led embodied experience that translates movement, sound, and movement coordination into a shared participatory encounter.
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[2026] ~ Festival entry concept
The Guided Route
A speculative festival entry experience designed for a night-time arts event like Dark Mofo. The concept was developed in a five-day sprint to test AI as a tool for experience visualisation.
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Custom-designed keepsake book:
- The route: a one-day, four-hour journey across six locations, moving from the familiar to the unknown so the emotional stakes built as the story reached further back in time.
- The materials: a mix of spoken narration, envelopes, prompt cards, old photographs, newspaper cutouts, infographic timelines, and reproduced archival documents including declassified records.
- The prompts: some reflective, others puzzle-like, for example decoding a handwritten document to identify a great-great-grandfather's tattoos, then drawing them onto a silhouette template.
- The keepsake: a custom-designed book combining a tactile scrapbook aesthetic with a minimalist editorial layout, made to be returned to and shared beyond the day.
- My role: end-to-end across research, writing, experience design, graphic design, production, and facilitation.
Documentation from the day:
This project mixed genealogical research with experience design to create a deeply personal roots discovery adventure for three adult siblings.
I began with in-depth genealogical research, gathering and cross-checking sources, triangulating conflicting details, and building a reliable narrative across four generations, from the family's first immigration to Australia onward. As the story took shape, I translated it into a location-based route and designed the reveal as a guided journey so participants could uncover the story themselves through staged fragments, printed prompts, and shared interpretation. My aims were to create a shared bonding experience that supports reflection and identity-making, and to recreate the feeling I had while researching: the slow build, the thrill of finding the right name, the fascination of decoding handwritten archival documents.
I began with in-depth genealogical research, gathering and cross-checking sources, triangulating conflicting details, and building a reliable narrative across four generations, from the family's first immigration to Australia onward. As the story took shape, I translated it into a location-based route and designed the reveal as a guided journey so participants could uncover the story themselves through staged fragments, printed prompts, and shared interpretation. My aims were to create a shared bonding experience that supports reflection and identity-making, and to recreate the feeling I had while researching: the slow build, the thrill of finding the right name, the fascination of decoding handwritten archival documents.
About:
A guided site-based narrative experience for a small audience.
Ancestral Pilgrimage
Documentation from the day:
Photos: Zhenya Ponomareva
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A series of invitation emails was sent as a form of pre-event activation. The first letter acted as a soft filter, helping guests decide whether they were willing to show up without the usual social mask. The following messages primed guests for the theme, childhood reflection, and dress prompt, allowing the experience to begin before arrival.
Pre-Event Activation
Experience Layout:
Inner Child is a play-based experiential gathering for a small group of guests, designed as a dreamlike environment where adults could loosen everyday social habits and re-connect with childlike curiosity and wonder. The experience used sensory shifts and simple interaction mechanics to explore how adults behave when a space gives them permission to be less composed, more creative, and slightly strange.
Staged over one evening in an open-plan studio, the experience was built as a sequence of thresholds, cues, and interaction points rather than a fixed program. Guests moved through a landscape of self-directed experiences at their own pace, with interaction emerging between participants rather than being formally directed.
In this self-directed project, I led the experience end to end, covering concept development, experience design, creative direction, interaction design, graphic design, set design, prop making, and facilitation.
Staged over one evening in an open-plan studio, the experience was built as a sequence of thresholds, cues, and interaction points rather than a fixed program. Guests moved through a landscape of self-directed experiences at their own pace, with interaction emerging between participants rather than being formally directed.
In this self-directed project, I led the experience end to end, covering concept development, experience design, creative direction, interaction design, graphic design, set design, prop making, and facilitation.
About:
A play-based experiential gathering for a small group of guests.
Inner Child
Project documentation:
- The research: a practice-based PhD investigating how physical movement and synchrony underpin human communication and connectedness, grounded in embodied cognition theory.
- The interface: two custom-made rocking chairs equipped with accelerometers, connected across distance through a shared generative soundscape that mimics ocean water movement. The sound moves with you, from shallow shoreline to deep open water, spatially distributed across front and rear speakers.
- The experience: designed to be entered without instructions, relying on the soundscape alone to guide participants into coordination, the interaction had to emerge, not be directed
- Exhibitions: The Never odd or eveN. D. Turnbull Tillman, T. Schiphorst, K. Cochrane (curtors). Tin Shed Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 9-12 February 2020 / The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies. K.Moline, A.Goddard, B.Davis, (curators). Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia, 1 July - 18 September 2021.
- Funding: University International Postgraduate Award UNSW; ADA HDR Essential Costs of Research Funding UNSW; HDR Completion Scholarship UNSW.
By rocking, participants interact with and adapt to one another through a shared soundscape that responds to both chairs in real time. The soundscape, created in collaboration with sound designer Frederick Robinson, draws on the undulating motion of ocean waves and is distributed across front and rear speakers, so as each person rocks, the sound shifts and moves spatially around them, making the other person's presence physically felt in the room.
The installation went through multiple iterations across controlled research settings and public exhibitions, with each version shaped by participant feedback. Some participants reported a heightened sense of connectedness with someone they could neither see nor speak to. Which was precisely the question the project was built to ask: what becomes possible when we design for the body rather than around it?
The installation went through multiple iterations across controlled research settings and public exhibitions, with each version shaped by participant feedback. Some participants reported a heightened sense of connectedness with someone they could neither see nor speak to. Which was precisely the question the project was built to ask: what becomes possible when we design for the body rather than around it?
Video by Tristan Cascailh
Video teaser:
In everyday life we are constantly synchronising with others without noticing: walking in step with a friend, clapping in time with a crowd, mirroring someone's posture mid-conversation. These small acts of physical coordination are not incidental, research shows that movement synchrony is one of the fundamental mechanisms through which humans establish empathy, rapport, and a sense of connectedness. Yet most communication technology ignores the body almost entirely.
Undula was built on that gap. Developed as part of my PhD research into embodied communication and human connectedness, it is an experimental installation featuring two identical custom-made rocking chairs connected across distance. Each chair captures its rocking movement and translates it into sound, creating a shared responsive soundscape between two participants in separate locations. By rocking, participants interact with and adapt to one another through a shared soundscape that responds to both chairs in real time.
Undula was built on that gap. Developed as part of my PhD research into embodied communication and human connectedness, it is an experimental installation featuring two identical custom-made rocking chairs connected across distance. Each chair captures its rocking movement and translates it into sound, creating a shared responsive soundscape between two participants in separate locations. By rocking, participants interact with and adapt to one another through a shared soundscape that responds to both chairs in real time.
About:
A dual-site interactive installation exploring human connectedness through shared movement.
UNDULA
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- Speculative entry for Dark Mofo or a similar night-time arts festival.
- Concept developed in a five-day sprint.
- AI-generated environment visuals and first-person video prototypes used to communicate the experience.
Process documentation:
This concept was developed in a five-day sprint to test AI as a tool for rapid experience visualisation. The idea was to turn the festival arrival threshold into a deliberately misleading navigation sequence designed to reveal a familiar behavioural loop: when uncertainty feels hard to tolerate, people start looking for external direction instead of trusting themselves.
The experience is structured as a looping entry sequence in which wayfinding, lighting, and spatial cues become progressively more directive. As uncertainty builds, participants are pushed into a recognisable pattern: scanning for reassurance, assigning meaning to ambiguous signals, and following whatever feels most official or approved. The path offers temporary relief through clarity, but that relief comes at the cost of agency. The loop only breaks when the participant chooses without certainty and accepts responsibility for the choice.
In this self-directed concept, I covered concept development, behavioural framing, experience design, and visual prototyping. The skill I tested here was translating an abstract psychological loop into a legible spatial experience, then communicating that experience quickly using AI-generated environment visuals and first-person video prototypes.
The experience is structured as a looping entry sequence in which wayfinding, lighting, and spatial cues become progressively more directive. As uncertainty builds, participants are pushed into a recognisable pattern: scanning for reassurance, assigning meaning to ambiguous signals, and following whatever feels most official or approved. The path offers temporary relief through clarity, but that relief comes at the cost of agency. The loop only breaks when the participant chooses without certainty and accepts responsibility for the choice.
In this self-directed concept, I covered concept development, behavioural framing, experience design, and visual prototyping. The skill I tested here was translating an abstract psychological loop into a legible spatial experience, then communicating that experience quickly using AI-generated environment visuals and first-person video prototypes.
About:
Speculative festival entry experience
The Guided Route
Yulia Brazauskayte,
Client List:
- PhD in Interaction Design exploring human connectedness experience.
- 10+ years across design practice, research, and teaching.
- Concept-to-realisation experience across exhibitions, objects, and experimental interaction design.
- Taught 50+ courses across 17 design subjects and 1000+ students.
- Senior product design experience coordinating public-space projects with architects, manufacturers, and city officials.
I trained as an object designer and worked in urban design, which taught me early that form is never neutral, objects and spaces shape how people inhabit their environment and relate to each other within it. That instinct carried into interaction design research and a PhD exploring embodied communication and human connectedness, where I learned that the body is where experience lands first, before language catches up. Teaching and facilitation added another layer, learning how to hold a group, read a room, and shape the conditions under which people genuinely engage together. All of that converges in participatory experience design, which is what I've always been making without always having the right name for it.
Designed experiences create eventness, anchoring those moments in memory. Participation intensifies that effect. When people are active inside a designed context rather than passive within it, they find permission to feel, relate, and understand themselves differently than ordinary life allows. In doing so, they may expand how they relate to themselves, to others, and to the world around them. It is that possibility I keep designing toward.
Designed experiences create eventness, anchoring those moments in memory. Participation intensifies that effect. When people are active inside a designed context rather than passive within it, they find permission to feel, relate, and understand themselves differently than ordinary life allows. In doing so, they may expand how they relate to themselves, to others, and to the world around them. It is that possibility I keep designing toward.
Experience Designer
