Emma Selley

In 2017 I graduated with a Bachelor of Design Innovation, and later that year I got a job at Sparks Interactive (where I am now a Content and Production Coordinator).  In my spare time I enjoy baking, playing hockey, shopping for vintage clothes, and scrolling aimlessly on my phone.

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Spider-Van: Into the Spider-Verse

Last October, my friends and I hired a van and went on a roadtrip to Auckland for Armageddon - where we dressed up as the characters from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I did this acrylic painting as a Christmas present to remember our trip.

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Film photography - Olympus Trip 35

I treated myself to an old film camera this year - these are some scans from my first roll of film (Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 400)

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Articles for Heart of the City

In 2018 and 2019 I contributed articles for Heart of the City, Auckland’s central city business association.

A selection of my articles:

Where to find the best salads

The best summer cocktails

Our favourite frozen treats

The best of...Daylight Saving

Our festival must-haves

Weekend brunch at City Works Depot

The best of Britomart shopping

Guide to zen in the city centre

City Works Depot eateries

Your guide to Halloween

A night out in Britomart

Brunch at North Wharf

Gift guide for him

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I Like Expensive Vintage Clothes But It Would Not Be a Smart Financial Decision to Buy Them

(so I turn them into art instead)

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Facebook - Threads Online

At Sparks Interactive, I’ve been involved in Facebook campaigns for Threads, an online clothing store.

I created content in the lead up to the launch of Threads’ website, and after that ran giveaway competitions, and monthly ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

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They kill us like earthquakes

A piece of writing I did in 2018, on one late December evening following the death of Grace Millane.

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The Joy Agency

The Joy Agency is a small social enterprise aimed at improving the lives of people living with cancer. In 2016, I worked part-time there, managing social media accounts as well as doing some design & photography.

This is a video I created to promote a GiveALittle campaign we were running. If you’d like to buy or sponsor a book you can do so here!

I was responsible for managing The Joy Agency’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This included creating and advertising content, like the photo edit above.

I also helped to deliver some books to patients in the chemotherapy ward and made this video to document our visit.

We held a book launch at the Beehive, where I created decorations and photographed the event. The decorations were made with the company’s key aim - to spread joy - in mind. I made paper fortune cookies containing positive messages, and a ‘guest book’ where you could hang your messages along the walls.

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one (concept app)

This is a concept app I designed as part of a Design Psychology paper. Backed by academic articles about the negative effects of online social pressure, I designed a new social media site which reduces some of the pressures of social evaluation and social competition.

Much of the app is based around the number one. The user is only allowed to use the app during one selected hour of the day, and both time stamps and read receipts are removed to continue the negating of time-based pressure. The user can also only post once a day, which encourages ‘quality over quantity’ content and minimises the amount the user can scroll through.

I removed many of the superfluous statistics that are present in other social media (such as friend lists and ‘likes’), so that the app discourages the competitive numbers aspect of social media.

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ChitChat App

This was the concept that I and two others came up with at Alphero’s 2016 design bootcamp (we won first place for this particular brief and second overall). 

Our brief for the day was to design an app for a fictional telco, ChitChat, mostly aimed at on the go students and young professionals. We were given the logo and colour palette, but the rest was up to us - my main role was to create content such as the plans, but we all did a bit of everything.

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The Story of How We Broke the Internet

This was a speculative design group project in which we imagined a world where social unrest over internet privacy concerns and government-controlled kill switches lead to the control of the internet being flipped. 

My main role in this project was to produce a series of images to help make the world more believable. To make the world as uncomfortably relatable as possible, I chose to make alternate versions of images that are already well known in New Zealand.

2018: Hacktivist group Anonymous are named Person of the Year for their work in overturning governmental control of the Internet.

2020: With databases and other educational material now open source, knowledge has become more accessible.

2021: The entertainment industry launches a campaign to show their concern over their work now being free to download. Governments struggle to legislate against wide spread piracy.

2022: In an attempt to regain control, some governments introduce an Internet Tax. A portion of this money goes to industries disadvantaged by their work now being free.

2023 - 2025: A growing number of people are becoming uneasy about the volatile state of the internet. The worldwide web is mysteriously and suddenly shut down, and a global ‘Internet Dark Age’ begins.

After a year of hard work, a new Internet is started up.

In a follow up project, I had to design an object from the timeline of our fictional world.

I chose the period during the Internet Dark Age and designed a DIY setup kit for Bluenet, an alternate form of wireless sharing that has been adopted by the community.

Bluenet uses individually owned Bluetooth stations to bounce information between each other - if one station is disconnected then the net will be broken and a number of other stations will be disconnected too.

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‘Oddness’ - a photo essay for CCDN 331

The brief was to create a photo essay set in the city, accompanied by a haiku and soundtrack. This had to be inspired by one of the readings set for the class - I picked the reading about flaneurs (people who ‘saunter around observing society’).

An important aspect of being a flaneur is the desire to experience a city in a new and potentially unexpected way. 

In this essay, I hoped to make people question how they view the city in their day-to-day lives – are they drawn to the odd details that punctuate the urban space around them, or do they only see what they need to see?

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Manifesto for Open-Mindedness - CCDN 331

During this paper, I had to write a manifesto about my design ideals, and then design a creative manifestation of these ideas.

My manifesto covered the need for designers to be less stubborn and to be more open minded about how they design and who they design for. [read the whole manifesto here]

The class’ manifestations were showcased for a week in one of the studios so I wanted mine to be interactive and to encourage open mindedness. This resulted in a tree-like structure where people could hang up their opinions, but only if they took someone else's opinion with them. [see more of this project]

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Memento mori for the modern day

The brief for this project was to take an object from a different time or culture and redesign it for a new context.

The object I chose was a Victorian mourning locket which traditionally contained hair of the deceased. To bring this into the modern day I changed the ‘identity’ aspect of the necklace from hair to social media data.

I downloaded my own social media data and put it on a USB stick, then cut the microchip into tiny pieces before setting it in a resin pendant. I also wrote an essay on the effect of online presence on the mourning process. 

The combination of the essay and the jewellery piece is intended to encourage people to think about what happens to their social media profiles when they die, and how it will affect their loved ones.

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Sweet Spot App

The brief for this project was quite open - to combine design and my minor (computer science) to solve a problem that I am interested in. 

As a cricket fan and design student, I know there are parts of the live cricket viewing experience that can be improved, so I wanted to find a way to help new fans understand the game, as well as encourage people to attend matches. 

In NZ, people have typically preferred to attend games at boutique grounds - however with the influx of fans after the success of the 2015 World Cup (along with technical requirements like lighting), games can’t always be held at small grounds.

I designed a concept app to be used in cricket stadiums - it provides live commentary and other standard features, but also gives fans the opportunity to engage with and help each other.  

Sweet Spot aims to appeal to both new and old fans by connecting them within the stadium and refreshing their experience of the game.

Home screen: Live scoring and commentary keeps fans up to date if they miss some of the action. Cricket terminology and scoreboards can be hard to understand, so pop-up explanations are available.

Q & A: This feature allows fans in the stadium to ask and answer questions, encouraging connection and helping new fans understand the game and its strange nuances.

Check in: Sign in using your social media accounts and see if your friends are at the game, and where they’re sitting.

Swap seats: Staying in the same seat for 8+ hours isn’t ideal, so the ‘swap seats’ feature lets fans get a new view for a set amount of time.

Along with information about the game, the app also includes features to improve the general stadium experience - such as venue maps and food ordering from your seat.

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Sensorial Design - Catching the Bus

The brief for this project was to use an everyday experience (in my case, the experience of taking the bus) as a starting point, and then to translate sensorial parts of this experience into another type of sense, in the form of tiles.

This paper also involved devising ways of testing and observing people using your tiles, as well as a group project in which we designed an exhibition space for the class to exhibit their tiles.

This card model shows how we planned to split the given space into a series of rooms, with each dedicated to tiles that utilised a particular sense.

To finish off the paper, I made a book that covered the development, testing, and results of my experiment. You can see the rest of the pages here

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Household Statistics

The brief for this project was to use something you are studying to inform your photos. Inspired by my statistics papers, I set about photographing items I found in my family home. I wanted to take mundane objects and try and give them more meaning by grouping them.

If I were to continue this project, I would focus on the bread tags and see what other ways I could arrange them - such as by day, colour, and year.