Joan Shin

A rigorous refresh of Decolonial Hacker’s digital platform after expanding formats, audiences, and architectural scale. Designed as both tool and critique, the platform extends Decolonial Hacker’s mission to challenge dominant narratives and nurture cross-border cultural resistance. Influenced by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “countervisuality,” the Decolonial Hacker web extension overlays institutional websites with alternative forms of knowledge, treating the interface as a contested space.

A vibrant, site-specific digital platform designed and built for Soft Centre’s first multi-location edition taking visual cues from the verdant landscapes of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The platform combines playful interactions with tactile, colour-rich scenes that mirror the festival’s themes of exploration, unfurling, and connection across dispersed locations.

For award-winning Creative Producer and Artistic Director Thorsten Hertog, I designed and built an interactive web environment that gestures to the fluid, shape-shifting nature of his practice. Visitors are invited to navigate a constellation of glimmering Three.js portals—each one opening into a distinct moment across film, festivals, digital art, and live performance.

Premiered as part of Soft Centre × Vivid Sydney 2022, Traces is a distributed live A/V performance conjured across three cities by DBR, cypha, Brigitte Podrasky, and Joan Shin. The work explores fragmented connections and disorderly exchanges in a post-pandemic, networked world. As collaborating visual artist, I developed a generative system in TouchDesigner that deconstructed sonic and sculptural data in real time—composing ghostly marks, ephemeral echoes, and gestural ruptures across space.

Lead designer and developer on a brand refresh for the Centre for Public Integrity. In response to the Centre’s mission to advance democratic transparency, the project encompassed a renewed identity system and public-facing digital platform. This included the design and development of two searchable indexes—the Lobbyist Register and Political Donor Directory—conceived as open tools to support the Centre’s ongoing work in promoting accountability and countering disinformation.

Led the design of renewed brand platform for the Nelson Meers Foundation, articulating its philanthropic ethos through a typographic and motion-led system grounded in Swiss modernist principles. The design language foregrounded restraint and clarity, with animated linework and compositional rhythm extrapolated from the geometric logic of the NMF logo mark—positioning the Foundation’s identity as both institutional and quietly assertive in its cultural commitments.

Commissioned by the School of System Change, the Learning Commons is an interactive garden interface that reimagines how knowledge is encountered and navigated. Designed as a living map, the platform embeds field kits, learning resources, and thematic pathways within an organic digital landscape. Using D3.js, the interface features bold, articulated connection lines reminiscent of transit maps, inviting users to navigate systems thinking as a dynamic network of relations and tools.

Digital platform design and build for Sydney-based content strategist, writer, and recipe developer Gemma Plunkett. This project brings her distinctive brand and newsletter, DING! to a digital home. The site is defined by a warm mocha backdrop, a deliberate choice that mirrors the rich, delectable tones of her recipes. A playful, custom-designed Maldon salt cursor adds a subtle layer of tactile delight, sprinkling with every click to elevate the user's interaction. This detail is a nod to her craft, transforming a simple digital action into a sensory experience.

‍Amusement Machines is a series of raree or peep shows that hybridises analogue pornographic viewing formats from the 17th century with the modern trickery of computer generated imagery. Using a small-viewing diopter meant for doors, each peepshow key-frames erotic positions from a CGI actor, exaggerating the perspectives of hyperrealism through illusions of depth. Playing upon the nuances of fear, persona and intelligence within technology, the exhibited CGI persona "breaks" from its public solitude, rupturing elements of fantasy and exposing the voyeur's animosity unto themselves.

Chillroom commissions for the limited experimental electronica event series GRIP.