ANISHA KHAN
Arctic Reef

Arctic Reef

UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

Project Details

Year

2025

Location

UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

Category

Academic

Type

Master's Studio

Role

Co-Designer

Collaborators

Juan Carlos Duarte, Kadambari Chavhan

Scale/Area

Speculative Food Ecology + Spatial Interface

Tools Used

Rhino 3DPhotoshopPhysical Prototyping

Design Narrative

A speculative studio project set within a broader 'Future of Food' investigation, imagining Arctic Reef as a digitally-mediated ecology for cultivating and distributing food in extreme, resource-scarce environments. The project pairs architectural form with a designed spatial interface — part tasting counter, part diagnostic instrument — that lets people engage directly with the engineered ecology through touch, taste, and augmented data readouts. Blueprint studies and interface diagrams work alongside physical prototypes to ask how architecture might frame a fundamentally different relationship between people, technology, and what they eat.

Project Gallery

Spatial interface prototype — tablet-based interaction with the engineered ecology

[ Spatial interface prototype — tablet-based interaction with the engineered ecology ]

Cultivated food output, presented as a tasting study

[ Cultivated food output, presented as a tasting study ]

Speculative render of the Arctic Reef spatial condition

[ Speculative render of the Arctic Reef spatial condition ]

Blueprint diagram of the digital ecology and spatial interface system

[ Blueprint diagram of the digital ecology and spatial interface system ]

Close-up interaction study — hands, device, and interface

[ Close-up interaction study — hands, device, and interface ]